It was a casual Saturday afternoon. My daughter was napping. My wife was assigning chores. The specific chore at that time — remove the large cardboard boxes that once contained a piece of furniture from the living room.
What my wife failed to realize is that these weren’t cardboard boxes. They were a fort waiting to happen. They were, to misappropriate a John Cougar Melloncamp lyric, “little cardboard houses for you and me. Oooh, for you and me.”
At daycare there is a large plastic house. Our daughter loves it. She runs into the house and pushes open the windows. This toy would never exist in our house. For one, we can’t afford another mortgage, even a plastic one. For two, my wife suffers from IDD or Interior Decorating Disease. Her IDD prohibits plastic tenements, especially in the living room.
However I was able to convince my wife and her IDD, to let me build our daughter a cardboard fort, as long as it only stayed the weekend.
So I grabbed the tools of the cardboard housing trade – scissors, packing tape — and my general misunderstanding of architecture — and went to work.
I arranged the boxes on the floor and had the brilliant idea to use the existing flaps as doors. I cut windows and made sure to include shutters. My daughter loves to open the shutters like she's Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning or Cinderella in uh, Cinderella.
I even cut out a sunroof in the ceiling, knowing full well that it would likely leak and she’d need to call a professional after heavy rains. But it helped bring natural light into the fort and I didn’t want to risk wiring up lights. I’m no electrician.
My wife kept asking if I was making the fort for myself or our daughter. The answer was obviously "yes."
It took the entire nap and lots of tape, but I built my daughter a functional, if not structurally sound, fort. Mike Holmes would be proud.
When my daughter woke from her nap, she was amazed with what I created. If she could speak in full articulate sentences she likely would have said “Dad, you built me a wonderful fort. Surely I will spend hours playing in and around this structure. Which if I may add is also environmentally friendly, because you reused existing goods that many would consider refuse. You truly are a wonderful father.”
As I stood in front of my (daughter’s) fort and watched her gleefully play, I knew the fort was a success.
My daughter loved that fort. She played with it all day Saturday.
But the real sign that it was a success: my interior-design afflicted wife let it (two large cardboard boxes affixed together with packing tape) stay in the living room for a whole week.
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