Box Hero

With the exception of seeing the inside of a packaging warehouse, I’ve never come in contact with as many boxes as we had when we moved in. Each gift we received came in a box. Each item that we bought to set up our house came in a box, sometimes two. Three in extreme cases.

I’ve never had to move large-scale for myself. Every time I’d moved from home to college, college to work, etc. I’ve been pretty minimalistic. I could move in and out in a few hours. Usually, all my things fit into a couple of duffle bags and four or five storage containers, with one or two loose boxes on the side. All of this fit comfortably in a small Buick.

Do you know how big the box a vacuum comes in is? Answer: about the size of a small Buick. Hence, my days of quick and easy moving were over.

After my family came and moved us in, it was up to us to figure out what to do with all the boxes. As we set up the rest of the house, all extra things went into the spare bedroom. You guessed it. All the boxes went in there, too.

Our little spare bedroom was filled, quite literally, to the top with boxes and spare “stuff” for the first week we were in our house. The room was a mess that I didn’t want in our home, so I started sorting things. I tried to fit as many of the boxes into each other as I could, but it was no use. Manufacturers purposely make their boxes just square enough and just oblong enough that, one way or another, they don’t fit inside one another. Now the floor was visible and the room was navigable. Regardless of my success, the tower of boxes remained.

Aaron wanted to use the room as a study, so we went to work organizing more things. He got a Martian death headache and ended up crashing on the couch for five hours, so I kept at it alone. I relocated the tower of boxes to the living room so I could do what I wanted with what was actually supposed to be in the spare room. It ended up looking pretty good, but the tower of boxes still loomed in the living room.

The next day, after we got home from school, I talked to Aaron about my predicament with the box tower. The exchange went something like this:

Me: Aaron, I’m not sure what to do with all these boxes.

Aaron: Why don’t we just throw them away?

Me: All of them?

Aaron: Yes. ALL of them.

Me: But, what if we just have to move again in a few months?

Aaron: We can get more boxes.

Me: (wide eyes - excited facial expression)

One pocketknife, some serious box collapsing and a small roll of packing tape later, Aaron and I had transformed our once-ominous box tower into a harmless bundle. The boxes went to the trash. Organization and space have reigned supreme since then.

Keeping the box tower in our house was just one of several silly ideas I’ve had as a newlywed wife. Aaron has a few now and again, too. I imagine that silly ideas won’t disappear entirely, regardless of how long we’re married. I hope they don’t. When we solve problems for each other, it makes us feel like heroes in some small way.

I guess even newlyweds need to save the day sometimes.