The excerpt below is from a series of articles from The Lazy HouseHusband Blog

With summer quickly approaching, I casually remarked to my wife that it would be great if we had a wooden outdoor table to put on the back verandah. That way, instead of spending the day working indoors on my notebook while Destructo, our youngest son, rips my bedroom office apart (”you just keep working Daddy … I’m playing!”), I could sit out the back with my laptop enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, watching over our young son. I pointed out to my wife that we could also sit outside and have breakfast together on weekends, and she agreed that it would be a great idea.

Anyway, last Sunday we were driving back home from a family excursion, when my wife suddenly stopped the car outside a house, a few blocks away from our home. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. She told me she had just spotted a garage sale and maybe we could find a wooden outdoor table there. “No way!” I snapped. “Let’s just go home! Besides, I don’t want to pay for a table. I’m sure we can find an outdoor wooden table for free.”

Sure enough, today as I was driving the kids to school, I drove past a house where someone was throwing out a large, round outdoors wooden table. Where I live, the council holds regular collection days where people throw away their oldappliances, furniture, equipment etc., many of them in reasonable condition and some just needing a little fixing. I’m not a Mr. Fix-It type of person and I can’t stand having more junk in the house, so I generally don’t take notice of these collection days, unless we’re after something in particular, like a chest of drawers for the kids clothes, or an exercise trampoline, and so on.

At first glance, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the table, however, and it looked like just the kind of outdoor patio table I was searching for. I made a mental note to return there after dropping the kids off at school.

When I drove back, the table was still sitting there. I parked the vehicle in their driveway, opened up the boot of our people mover and lowered the back seats to make room for the table. I quickly inspected the table and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, so I cleared the top off some of the things the owners had piled on it and started carrying it towards the rear of the vehicle.

Unfortunately, it was too large to fit in. I tried tilting it this way and that way, but the round table top was just too big to fit. What a bummer …

Read the rest of the article here: Househusbands

Tags: Family