Several weeks ago Randy and I tackled the next painting project in our house. Having finished the kitchen and family room cabinets we started on the seven foot long built-in china cabinet in the dining room. All the cabinets in our house, which was built in 1979, are the original dark stained wood: kitchen and family room cabinets, china cabinet and the wall of cabinets in the hallway. We have so many cabinets we could rent storage space for extra cash. But they aren’t pretty anymore, hence the painting projects.
Anyway, back to the china cabinet. On the top there are four glass-fronted doors on cupboards which reach to the ceiling. The lower cabinet has two vertical rows of four drawers each (total 8 drawers) in the center, flanked by a door on the left and one on the right, with a generous seven foot countertop. We may fancy up the countertop later but for now it will be painted to match the rest of the built in cabinet.
First task was to remove all doors and drawers (and sand; thank you, Randy). That’s when the spooky part happened. Pulling out the top drawers wasn’t a big deal, just another empty drawer beneath each one. But the bottom two, oh my. Dust bunny graveyard. Fuzzy grossness personified.
And, what’s this? All this stuff coated with dead dust bunnies. Yuk. I pulled them out gingerly, vacuuming as I went, hoping for no scurrying eight-legged monsters (there were none). Papers and little round cd’s and an instruction manual for … something or other. And kids’ drawings that should have been magnetized to the fridge door. So much detritus.
But the jackpot prize of the denizens of the under-the-drawers-world was an 8 X 10 picture, in its cardboard stand-up frame, of a happy, smiling young man in his Mustangs Baseball uniform.
My heart sank. I felt so bad for the boy who loved baseball and was so proud of being on the team and who held his bat as he smiled for the camera, and who proudly gave that picture to his mom and dad.
And I felt so bad for that mom who must have looked all over her house for that picture of her son! The picture of the son she was so proud of, the picture she wanted to show to his grandparents, and in fact to anyone who, unsuspecting, happened by for a visit.
Where in the world had it gone?
I know where. Into the Twilight Zone.
It is those dark, hidden, unseen, never thought about places in our houses that are The Portals to the Twilight Zone, the place things go to disappear.
Until someone decides to paint the built-in china cabinet.
