Furniture Consignment Gallery Blog

Just days before Christmas, the ping pong table went on sale. I couldn't resist. So I bought it and hid it from my wife and boys in the garage.

What fun this will be, I thought, giddy with anticipation. Best gift ever! We'll spend hours playing together, laughing together, hugging, high-fiving our victories. Everyone knows that ping pong is the Elmer's glue of family bonding.

On Christmas Eve, with the boys tucked in bed, I raced to the garage. My wife stood at the front door, skeptical. My last-minute no-list shopping expeditions have been known to be problematic. Every year, I set off like a 17th century explorer: armed, determined and dangerous. She never knew what I would drag home.

As I rolled the table up to the house, it looked more and more like an enormous mastodon. We could hardly squeeze it through the door. Suddenly, I realized with a crushing sense of doom, we'd never wrestle this baby down into the basement.

"Brilliant," my wife snarled.

Fortunately, I've got furniture-moving expertise. And our family room was full of furniture - pretty much all of it unnecessary in my view! I tipped the sofa on its side, rolled a chair around the corner, and flipped the ottoman into another room. When the dust settled, I'd created a sports arena with the table in the center.

Christmas morning arrived, and there were shrieks of joy from the boys. We picked up our paddles and the battle began. Outside, snow flurries whipped around the house. Inside, ping pong balls bounced off the walls.

When grandparents, and uncles arrived, they had to suck in their bellies to squeeze around the furniture stacked by the front door. A crowd gathered around the table. Merrily, we fought for ping pong supremacy. My wife even managed to forgive me - that is, until a ball splashed into the pan of gravy bubbling on the stove.  

And then it hit me. Maybe I wasn't the only fool who brought home a gift so large it required us to empty the house of furniture. So if you, like me, got swept up in the holiday spirit and you need to sell off your furniture to accommodate a new ping pong table ... well, Furniture Consignment Gallery is here to help.

But as for your fuming spouse, you're on your own.

"Beautiful!" the octogenarian bellowed at his wife a few feet away. The pair was admiring a massive cherry hutch with beveled glass they found in the showroom and intended to buy. "We can move this ourselves," his wife hollered back with delight. "We don't need to pay the delivery fee."

Looking a bit doubtful, he gingerly made his way over to the hutch and attempted to lift the top half of the hutch an inch or two to gauge its weight. "I think we can get it," he announced with confidence to the entire population of Hanover, MA. She made her way to the opposite side and concurred. "Oh, yes, dear, we can."

To this pair, life is a bucking bronco - and you'd best grab it by the horns.

Married when Elvis was crooning Love Me Tender on the Hit Parade, the two were still feathering their nest and having adventures. After a buying spree in our showroom, they were going to look at motor homes for a cross-country jaunt. 

He was 82. She was 81. The fun, they assured me, was just starting. 

The two actually preferred the view at 10,000 feet. Both have been aviators since they were first married. They have flown the friendly skies in his-and-her single-engine planes for more than a half-century.

Hers is a sporty 1968 Beechcraft, a plane that just begs for a flight outfit of go-go boots and a miniskirt.  She went out to the car to get photos. "I'll never sell it," she exclaimed. "It's my baby." Her husband just put a new engine in it for her.  

As for the hutch, I proposed they leave the heavy lifting to the pros. Why risk a slipped disc when there's so much more left on the bucket list? I convinced them to let our young bucks bring the hutch home for them - and they almost had me signed up for flight lessons.  

Those two old birds are doing it right: life at full throttle, even in your 80s.

Love the Adventure book featured? Buy it here.