When procrastination becomes permanent: Fighting back!

Right before Thanksgiving last Fall, John and I violently squeezed an incredibly old and unreliable electric stove into our pantry.

"What?!?" you just said. 

Yes. We purposefully and without ease moved a really crappy old stove (it came with the house, to give you some sense of its condition) into our pantry so we'd have a second cooking surface and extra ovens to use over the holidays. It was brilliant. Or pretty brilliant. (It turned out that only one of the ovens actually worked properly. The other produced a series of fireworks we deemed to be "dangerous" and didn't explore further.) In our defense, the other oven and all four burners worked perfectly, we cleaned the hell out of it, and it ended up being used almost nonstop from Hanukkah through to New Year's. Fastforward to...

April 25th, 2014. Yes. It has been almost exactly 5 months, to the day, since we moved that wretched stove into the pantry and it was still there! You need to understand that getting it in there was a true feat of physics and spatial relations. It involved me actually climbing through the pantry cupboard from the dining room into the pantry so I could squeeze behind the stove to get it in. I can't emphasize enough how hard it was to get it in there. It weighs 1980's amount of stove-- it's one of those double-height numbers-- THIS WAS NO EASY TASK!!! It was like trying to parallel park a full-length sedan in a spot intended for a compact car. It could be done, there was just a lot of "forward, shift, backward, shift, forward, shift, backward."  John and I were daunted by the unpleasantness of getting it back out. There would almost certainly be some muffled profanity (muffled because Jules would be napping, as there was no way we could move it while he was awake. But make no mistake, just because the profanity was muffled in reality, it would be screaming in our heads.) We figured the walls would get all scratched up again (Yep. We did that the first time too.) And if we were going to be honest, we just didn't really want to deal with it. 

I confess. It was a quintessential case of procrastination. 

Until yesterday. We recently discussed the ongoing presence of the stove (coming up on it's 6 month anniversary was not a good thing...) and decided that it was time to face our demons. John's parents had made a plan to stop by the farm house yesterday and we declared "Now or never!" and decided to tackle the thing!!!

 And guess what?!? It took about 30 seconds to get it out of the pantry. I'm not kidding. I don't know how or why (John's says we mastered the process on the way in, so we already knew how to get it out. I'm thinking maybe we just stretched the room on the way in, so there was enough room on the way out...) but either way, it was literally like, "forward, shift, backward, shift, DONE." 

Hooray!! The pantry has been liberated!! 

And it looks so much better without that over-sized nasty 1980's stove inside it!! The moral of this story is probably something like, "Avoidance is not the best policy" and sometimes you find out your avoiding something for no freaking reason and you should have just done it after New Years. 4 months ago.

Lesson learned? I wouldn't count on it.