In the Closet

This is the story of how Tiffany and I nearly paid $300 for a pair of shelves in our closet. Here's what happened:

We live in a very small apartment. Surprisingly, we have a lot of storage space, but most of it is accessible only with a nine-foot ladder that the tenants of the building share. The thought of having to climb to the top of aforementioned ladder every time I wanted a pair of jeans or a sweater was not appealing. So after weeks of living out of boxes...

(Okay, fine, we're still living out of some boxes)

...we decided we simply had to have shelves in our closet to accompany the bar for our hanging clothes. Tiffany dreamed of Perfect Shelves. In fact, I think she dreamed of a Custom-Built Closet because each day she came home with some more elaborate shelf system that required a set of tracks, lots of screws, and a Stud Finder, which at first I thought was an electric shaver.

After several failed attempts and returns of products, we asked a handyman to appraise our project. He quoted us a hundred bucks for labor. We nodded our heads. We had $100 worth of spackling to do to cover up the holes we'd already made, so this seemed reasonable. When he quoted us $200 for material, I continued to nod, but inside I was shaking my head vigorously from left to right.

"I don't feel good about this," I whispered to Tiffany after we had closed the door on our handyman with a tentative agreement.

"Me neither."

If we were still living in San Francisco, away from the wise counsel of our family, we may have paid that absurd amount of money. But when our New York uncles came over, Rob began to shake his head as soon as we said "handyman."

He told us what we needed, and it pretty much boiled down to:

1) A long piece of wood
2) A handful of nails

Our shelves cost us about $50 bucks. Labor was free, obviously, although it took its toll.

One of our shelves was slightly longer than the other (It's possible the scary-looking man at the hardware store who cut our wood hated us because we looked like we were enjoying life) and our walls are crooked. Before we figured that out, I blamed Tiffany for measuring wrong.

Also, we didn't take our hanging clothes out of the closet to build our shelves, so we were highly irritated with each other, sweating and smushed in among my work suits and Tiffany's going-out dresses, holding nine-foot pieces of wood above our head in a terrible home-improvement version of Twister.

When it finally dawned on us to consider how funny we looked, we started laughing, which made holding the nine foot pieces of wood all the more difficult.

"You should have seen us," I told Rob the next week as we bragged about our work over dinner. "We looked like..."

I paused. Everyone stared at me expectantly.

"Well, you know, we really looked exactly like two lesbians in a tiny closet!"