Buying All The Things

Sometimes I read a blog post that just totally hits the nail on the head. A post I want to email to all of my friends and say “See! This is what I mean. This blogger just articulated what I was trying to say much better than I did. Now do you understand?”

Such was the case when I read “You Don’t Need All The Things (But Sometimes Things Help)” on A Practical Wedding. APW, if you’re one of the ten people who haven’t stumbled across it yet, is a community of sane people who craft beautiful essays musing on all sorts of valuable topics—marriage-related and otherwise.

The post suggested that yes, we live in a society where we are constantly told we need to buy this thing or that thing, and yes, it can be nice to consciously decide to live simply and avoid buying everything. But sometimes, buying a particular object helps relieve a relationship stressor and make the whole thing go much more smoothly. The author’s object was The Dishwasher, but mine was The Dresser.  

The apartment K and I share has three tiny bedrooms. We moved a garment rack and our dressers into the middle bedroom to turn it into a walk-in closet. I have an enormous six-foot long Ikea dresser that I absolutely love. Its long, wide wood top, becomes a magnet for all of our larger events where we dump all of the clothes after they come out of the dryer. K’s dresser has three drawers that are huge and deep and utterly inconvenient for storing clothes. Because his dresser is poorly designed and I hate folding clothes and just throw them on top of the mountain/avalanche on my dresser, the situation in that room has gotten out of control. Every morning, I end up searching for fifteen minutes in this massive pile of clothes because I can’t find anything. It was slowly (but certainly) chipping away at my sanity. I declared that we should buy a new dresser. One with lots of drawers for K to put his clothes away. We’d squeeze his old dresser into a corner of our bedroom and use it to hold sheets and towels. This dresser would make every morning more relaxed as I would finally be able to find the clothes I was looking for without causing the whole pile to topple over. It would make every evening better as all of the sheets were neatly folded and easier to find, and it would make our relationship better as I stopped cursing at K for not putting his clothes away.

Yes, getting all the way out to Ikea was a giant pain, and no, we still haven’t put together the 8-million piece dresser, but at least we’ve taken one step closer to implementing a solution. The APW article helped legitimate my decision to buy K a dresser, driving home the point that sometimes spending a little bit of money to address a problem can make an enormous and unquantifiable improvement in the situation.

What do you think of this idea? Have you ever bought something to address a nagging issue? What was the outcome?