ain't nobody got no time for that

Once upon a time there were three pieces of furniture in the no plot family dining room who were very, very sad. They longed to be the kind of dining room that received visitors on occasion but they had fallen in with a bad crowd (the no plot family) and hadn't had any callers in quite some time.

Because the no plots were constantly being inundated with the detritus of life, e.g. bills, flyers, miscellaneous tools, report cards, mystery crap that no one could identify, school photos, a multitude of artworks created by a child prodigy whose genius defied her age, and many other implements of tree destruction, the no plot dining room often fell into long periods of disuse other than as a repository for the items listed above.

I forgot to take a before picture but I found a picture on the interweb which will give you an idea:



How this guy got into my house I'll never know.

One day, the no plots decided to host a family dinner but had just returned from a trip and had little time or energy for the agonizingly slow process of clearing off the dining room table and finding homes for all the displaced refugees residing there. (The sideboard was sometimes cleared for company but the side table was always shit out of luck.)

Then I had an idea. A wonderful, awful idea.

What if I just crammed all this crap into a cardboard box, hid the box, and figured out where the crap should go later?!?!

So that's what I did, with some exceptions (why would anyone leave Liquid Wrench on an eating surface?).

The boxes (plural) were spirited away and the dining room became a (mostly) guilt free zone; the dining table went back to serving dinner and the top of the sideboard went back to displaying whimsical tchotchkes as God intended. The side table was still shit out of luck but was eventually shown some love at a later date.

Now view the amazing transformation:

Here are the boxes which I can assure you are now almost absolutely sorted:

Not pictured is the dining room table which had a bit of a relapse.

By Mkey (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Okay, the dining room has reluctantly agreed to have its shame paraded on the web for your amusement:

This final picture added to emphasize that beauty can often be found amongst the clutter of life:

And the dining room furniture and the no plots lived happily ever after.

(Also not pictured is the computer room which is the new mail room and is a work in progress).