My husband and I met when I was really young. I was 17 when we went out on our first date. Conventional wisdom says that we never should have made it this far but never the less we have. We didn’t get married immediately although we wanted to. I graduated high school. We each went to different colleges although we were able to stay within a 2-4 hour drive of each other most of the time. We had our ups and downs like any other long distance relationship for the 5 years before we got married and finally stopped being a long distance relationship. One of our favorite pastimes on the weekend was to wander around Home Depot and talk about what our future house would look like. On one of our wanders I came across a ceiling fan, which I promptly fell in love with. For months, I would always look at that ceiling fan when we went to Home Depot but I knew it was crazy, on our limited college student budget, to buy a fan that we had absolutely no place to hang and nothing to do with. My husband, Brian, has always had a quirky sense of romance, so on one of these trips he bought my fan for me against all my protests. It was at that point, I knew we were going to make it. It was by far the most romantic thing he had done to that point. He bought me a fan for a house we hadn’t found yet and said when we did buy the house then we would put the fan up. We got married the next year and moved to California. The fan, of course, came along, still in the original box, never opened. We rented in Fresno for 3 years so the fan still sat quietly in its box. When we moved to Calistoga, we still moved the fan in the box with us to our new rental. A year later we bought our house in 2010 however there was no place to hang our ceiling fan when we arrived. We had to completely gut and renovate the house, which I may add we are still not finished with. For almost 4 years the fan sat in its box in the back of Brian’s closet waiting for the promised day that we would hang it. Finally that day arrived last week. After some concerns as to how the fan had handled 9 years in the box we went for it.
We hung it together and once it was up it took me back to the day 9 years earlier in the ceiling fan isle of Home Depot when we made a promise to each other that one day we would have a home together in which we could hang our fan. We put it up ourselves since we are died in the wool do it yourselfers and have enjoyed its breeze ever since. There seemed to not be any ill effects from the years in the box and luckily it has a limited lifetime motor warranty since the standard warranty ran out a while ago. 🙂
One Response
Love this story! It’s so romantic. Although I know the two of you are mad about each other – and a great team – I’ve never gears anything like this before. It is really so sweet.
Fan looks great too (;