The story of a piece of “furniture” I’ve owned for 41 years.

The crate arrived in the US in 1981, delivered to the Manhattan home of the parents of the guy I was dating back then. It was a large crate, but it arrived from Hungary containing only 12 bottles of Hungarian wine, all nestled in tightly packed straw. Even after the careful packing and protection, one of the bottles arrived broken.

The crate was well made of solid wood pieces. It was heavy — probably about as heavy as the wine it contained — and, as you can imagine, a wealthy couple living on the Upper East Side with a view of the Queensboro Bridge had absolutely no use for it once the wine was removed. Their son, a senior at Hofstra University did, though. He was living in a dorm room and it would make a nice piece of furniture.

The Crate Becomes Furniture

So he brought it back to the dorm, put a pair of hinges on its lid to make a door, and installed a shelf and some cup holder hooks inside it. He then stood it on one end and put his dorm-sized refrigerator on top of it. It made a nice addition to his 9 x 12 dorm room.

I don’t remember if I came into the picture before or after its arrival. I dated Stew for about a year, breaking things off not long after we graduated. I seem to recall him adding the hinges, which means it arrived after I did. But I don’t recall getting the big thing from Manhattan to Hempstead. So who knows? It doesn’t really matter.

When we graduated and moved out of our dorm rooms, he offered up the crate, since he planned to go back to his parents home in Manhattan and definitely didn’t need it. I took it. I liked crate furniture. (I still kind of do.)

The Crate in My Homes

Between my college graduation and today, I’ve lived in exactly five homes.

The first was my first apartment right out of college, which I moved into in spring 1982. It was in a sketchy area of Hempstead, NY, on the sixth floor of an apartment building with windows that included a view of the Hoftstra dorm towers. It was a large studio apartment with separate kitchen and dressing room/closet between the main room and the bathroom. In hindsight, it was actually a nice place, although the area, as I said, was sketchy. A few of my friends were afraid to come visit me. I never had a problem there.

I fixed up the studio into two rooms by placing three tall veneered particleboard bookshelves between my sleeping area and my living room. I had my original bed — the twin I’d grown up sleeping in — and a lot of junk furniture. The crate became my “coffee table,” sitting right in front of the Ikea fold out sofa.

In summer 1983, I met my future wasband. In January 1984, he and I moved into our first apartment together, a third floor walkup in a row of houses right over the Cross Island Parkway in Bayside, NY. The crate came with us. I honestly can’t remember where we put it in that three bedroom apartment. It may have been in the spare room, which became a cat hair infested storage space until I was forced to find homes for my two cats — my future wasband was allergic and had asthma. (To this day, I wish I’d kept the cats and found a home for him.)

Two years later, in January 1985, we bought our first house together. It was an interesting home made entirely of reinforced poured concrete with something like 40 jalousie windows — that’s the kind you crank with a handle to open slats. Built in 1926, it was unique and would have been a fixer-upper if you didn’t mind working with a sledgehammer. On a quiet street in Harrington Park, NJ, there was a Conrail freight train line just beyond the backyard. For 11 years, I lived with freight trains literally a stone’s throw away from my bedroom window.

The crate became the coffee table in the TV room. It was probably around then that we started storing board games in there. By this time, it was used lying on its long side with the hinged lid on the top.

In 1997, my future wasband and I made the move from the New York metropolitan area to Wickenburg, AZ. This was a huge life change. We bought a brand new spec house on 2 1/2 acres of horse property for the same price as the old house along the tracks in New Jersey. Our cost of living plummeted and our quality of living soared. I was in my late 30s and it was my first full-time taste of living away from a metro area. I loved it. (I thought my future wasband did, too, but after hearing from my sister about some of the places he’s lived since we split, I’ve begun to suspect he prefers suburbia.)

The crate came with us. It became the table in our TV area on the second floor. We still stored games in it. And I even have a picture of it there, since it was mentioned in an old blog post I wrote while going through my divorce.

In 2013, as my divorce dragged on, I packed up the crate and moved it into storage. When the movers came in September of that year, they took it with everything else all the way up Washington State, where I’d leased a hangar for my helicopter and had plenty of room for my cars, boat, and storage of furniture and household items. The crate — and most of my other stuff — lived in storage for nearly a year.

On May 20, 2014, we broke ground for my current home. By my birthday at the end of June of that year, the shell of my home was finished with the concrete slab laid. I had a party and my friends helped me move just about everything out of the hangar, across the river, and into my new garage. Including the crate.

As my various posts about building my home detail, I did a lot of the interior work on my home myself. Once I had a space to get work done, I started collecting tools. Eventually, I needed a miter saw so I could cut lumber to build a workbench and other things. The saw I bought did not come with a table. I decided to use the crate as a miter saw station — after all, I had more than enough furniture from my old house and wouldn’t need the crate as another coffee table. I put wheels on the bottom of the crate — nearly everything in my garage has wheels so I can move it — and mounted the miter saw on top. I put new shelves inside the crate to store saw blades and related parts.

And since then, I’ve used the saw on its crate table to build all kinds of things out of lumber: a workbench, 8 garage shelving units, a jewelry bench, two chicken coops, and small tool tables. I also used it extensively while finishing the upstairs of my home to cut Pergo for the floors, lumber for stem walls and rails, and trim throughout my home. The beauty of the saw on that table is that I can roll it anywhere I need to in the downstairs space when I need it and then roll it out of the way when I’m done.

Here’s the crate and its saw in its current location. I’ve set aside a 12 x 12 section of my garage as a workshop for building and repairing things. The crate has been the home for my miter saw for 9 years now.

The Crate Today

I’m in the midst of a huge garage reorganization project and I finally found what is likely to be the “forever home” for the crate and its miter saw. I’ve been tooting my progress on social media — Mastodon — with photos. This morning, I looked at a recent toot that showed a photo of it and thought about my history with this crate. I think I’ve owned it longer than just about anything I currently own. I can’t remember a single thing — other than a handful of keepsakes from my childhood and college years — that I’ve owned longer.

And that inspired me to share this blog post.

I have no real emotional attachment to this crate — please don’t think I do. It’s just its utility that makes me respect and keep it. Someone took the time to build this out of nice, strong wood. It crossed an ocean carrying just 12 bottles of wine and came close to being discarded. Instead, it’s had a long life as part of my life — and it continues to serve me to this day.

How many things do you own that you can say the same about?