Underneath It All

As winter approaches, the pile of warm clothing adjacent to my front door drifts like snow, heaping against the wall and over the sofa; obscuring every available flat surface.

Faced with these mounds of boots, fleece, and Gore-Tex, I chose to fight back. I decided it was incumbent upon me to contain these fallen mittens and scarves in a manner both organized and accessible.

Problem was, I didn't have a containment system up to the challenge.
..........

Last year, I attempted to perfect the use of the big plastic box (AKA: BPB). In this scenario, all scarves, hats, mittens, and other warm gear got tossed pell-mell into the BPB, where they jumbled in a heap; intermingling with no regard for ownership.

It was - in almost every way - an imperfect solution.

When a child queried, "Where's my scarf?" I would answer, "Did you check the big plastic box?"

Inevitable answer: "No."

Of course not. Why on Earth would they look there?

One symptom of my kids' abhorrence of organizational schemes is their firm, unfaltering resistance to even acknowledging the existence of such schemes. They are organizational agnostics.

Like a missionary, I attempted to bring them the truth. To show them the light, the way, the mittens: "Well, go check there. That's where they should be."

The child would go off to check, disgorging the full contents of the BPB onto the floor in the process.

Inevitable result: "It's not here."

"If you put it in the box when you took it off, it should be there. Did you put it there when you took it off?"

Inevitable answer: "Uhhhh....."

Further investigation on my part would usually reveal that the scarf was, in fact, in the BPB, or on the floor next to the BPB where it had been disgorged by the child attempting to find it amidst the chaos.

Alternately, the mitten was often declared "lost forever," and the subject of much weeping, consternation, and rending of other garments.

Usually we would ultimately discover the item in the car, or at school, or stuffed into a shoe next to the door, or in a jacket pocket, or on the floor next to the toilet, or in a box of crayons, or frozen into the snow on the front step.

Pretty much anywhere other than the place it should have been.

And, on rare occasions, winter accessories apparently achieved translocation to whatever dimension socks, scarves, and mittens abscond to for vast portions of their use lives.

Which all goes to say that even I - the BPB evangelist - found the strategy lacking. It was just a container for our mess, not a remedy for the mess itself. We needed something better.

I briefly considered buying some new sort of entryway furniture. Target carries hallracks with benches, and there are a lot of things from Ikea that would probably work.

But I don't want to spend more money. Even reasonable amounts of money. And I really don't want to buy more stuff.

We already have plenty of stuff. The drifts of hats, scarves, and mittens, for instance, are stuff. And stuff, no matter how desirable, always somehow requires - through it's very existence - the acquisition of more stuff that can be used to contain the stuff.

It's mind numbing. It's too much. It's driving me insane.

We have so much stuff.

When I thought it through, it occurred to me that one nice thing about all this stuff is that, somewhere amidst the clutter, we probably already had a containment system that would work.

So I looked around my house, to see what might be repurposed.
..........

When I think about my father working in the garage, I envision him standing at an antique piece of furniture that was central to his work space. I don't know what it's actually called, but "sideboard" seems probable. It has some shelves above an oblong, beveled mirror and a bunch of drawers that he used to hold screws, nails, and wrenches. One drawer was set up with partitions - they were intended for silverware - and was lined with a soft, blue velvet. When I opened it, it exuded that pleasant, oily smell of tools and hardware.

I love that smell.

I have been told that this sideboard was originally part of my parents' collection of living room furniture, which - the story goes - was sort of a motley assortment of pieces. As the current owner of a sort-of-motley assortment of furniture, I can understand my mom's desire to have things kind of match each other a bit, despite having varied origins. She accomplished this by painting her motley collection of furniture white.

Viola! Matching furniture!

In these, the days of Antique Roadshow, it seems obvious that this constitutes some sort of crime against furniture. Leigh and Leslie Keno rail against painting antiques on an almost weekly basis. But back in the olden days of the early '70s, I'm sure the white-painted sideboard and matching shelves looked super fly with my parents' zebra-striped faux-fur bean bag.

I love my father's repurposed work bench so much that, after leaving home, I offered to trade him the piece for an actual work bench. It was a tactical error to ask after leaving home, though, because over the past dozen years I have never had a chance to get it. I can only hope that, one day, there will be a way for it to get moved up to join my current sort-of-motley assortment of furniture. And I have always dreamed that - by that day - I would have acquired the necessary skills to make it something other than white.

Crimes against furniture notwithstanding, I'm a natural-wood sort of gal.

So when I looked around my home for possible containment systems for hats, gloves, and scarves, and my eyes settled upon an old, white-painted, hand-me-down dresser covered in stickers, I saw both a containment system and a learning opportunity.
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If I have learned one thing from this learning opportunity, it is this: It is probably not worth the time, effort, and - more to the point - loss of brain cells it takes to refinish something about which you do not care deeply.

Somewhat conversely, I have also learned this: It is best to start your refinishing career with an item about which you do not care deeply.

In that sense, the little dresser was the perfect first project. It was small, not special or particularly nice, and it didn't belong to someone whose memory I cherish.

My husband and I acquired it in grad school from a guy who was leaving for another program and didn't want to get a U-Haul. A nice guy, but not someone I'm as sentimental about as, say, my grandma.

Over the years, one of the drawers developed a crack and the white paint had been embellished with crayons, markers, and some of those stickers that they give to kids at grocery stores. It was a mess.

I was using it to hold random scraps of paper. Yeah. Really. Let's not talk about it.

Suffice it to say that it was ready to serve a more noble purpose.

So, we purchased a bottle of CitraStrip "Safer" Stripper and some other random scraping tools and I got to work.

The bottle of CitraStrip alleged that it was safe for indoor use, so I figured I'd be good in the garage, which isn't airtight. Given that I've never used anything other than CitraStrip, I can't tell you if it is actually any safer, less toxic, or less likely to induce hallucinations than any other stripping product. What I can tell you is that for about 12 hours after stripping concluded, my heart was racing, I had funny thoughts, and my head felt screwed on all wrong.

This, in my opinion, might be the best reason not bother with too much more furniture refinishing. If I do find a reason to try again, it will be outside, in the summer, on a day with a nice breeze.

Fume high aside, the CitraStrip worked pretty well, bubbling up most of the paint with the first application. Everything that wasn't worked into a nick or crack.

Removal of the paint revealed another truth about refinishing furniture (and a lot of other endeavors): You can spend a lot of time with some stripper, and peel back a lot of layers, only to discover that what lurks beneath isn't all that appealing.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what I expected. It's a little wooden dresser. Not awful, not beautiful. Functional. It'll do. But once I'd scraped it was clear that the dresser wasn't worth spending a lot more time on. The law of diminishing returns pretty well predicted that further effort would not be rewarded with vast improvement. It would still look like an ordinary little dresser.

Like Kenny Rogers says: "You've gotta know when to walk away. Know when to run."

Even buzzed on "safer" fumes, I knew it was time to fold 'em.

I glued the cracked drawer, stained all the visible surfaces, and put the hardware back on. The dresser now stands by our front door, ready to accept our gloves, hats, and mittens. It generally matches my other wood furniture.

Success.
..........

The kids are dazzled with my mad skills. They can't believe that this is the same dresser they used to draw on. They were excited to lay claim on their individual drawers. Kids always love to feel like something is theirs.

My husband, on the other hand, almost laughed himself into a hernia at the notion that our family would manage to maintain our stuff in our individual drawers.

He's probably right. But, what can I say? Hope springs eternal.
..........

I realize now that, when I took on this project, I wasn't thinking about this little white dresser, I was thinking about the large, white sideboard in my father's garage - a project I've been pondering for years. It would have taken a lot more (not to mention less "safer") fumes to transmute one into the other, though.

But I now know that, if ever there is a day that I can undertake the task of peeling away the paint on that sideboard, I should enlist the help of someone more skilled in the process than I am. And perhaps that's the most important thing I could have learned from this project: how not to mess up when it really matters.

Knowing is half the battle.

In the meantime, I can get to work in our battle against the drifting outerwear. Will this be the moment our family actually achieves organizational zen?

Yeah. Well... I didn't inhale that much stripper.