Merry Christmas Ryan Love Hock

This year I did service in honor of Ryan. I was excited to receive Ryan as my service recipient because he and I have grown quite close over the years starting with when we spent a lot of time together while we were finishing school in Utah.
I was also a little stressed about having Ryan because he had done such a great service project for Lani last year, and because his list of suggestions included go on a young men's camp out, chaperon a youth dance, or do service at someone's house. I felt like the volunteering at a youth camp out was a bit of a cop out because I had already done that this last year as part of my calling, and didn't feel like that was going to be enough of a challenge. I liked the idea of doing some work around my parents house but I had already planned to do some things around their house as part of my rent for living with them. I finally came up with a plan for how I could help my parents around the house that was not just part of what I had already planned to do.

I decided for my service project I was going to completely clean and organize my parents attic and garage. I knew this was a major project because my parents garage and attic has 30 years worth of accumulated treasures, but I thought if I put in some serious time that I would be able to get it cleaned and organized by Christmas.

After spending some time out there on my own, and after discovering some real gems like this classy wolf jacket and those awesome glasses (see below), I realized that this project was going to require about the same number of man hours as an Eagle Scout project. The problem was that I couldn't, as much as I wanted to, just throw EVERYthing away. I tried and found it was not "helping" in my mom's opinion. I decided that in order to complete the service by Christmas, without being kicked out of my current residence, a more realistic goal was to build shelves for my parents attic to store loose items that don't stack well, like sleeping bags and camping gear. I also wanted to make a dent in the garage and take some of the things that I knew my parents wanted to get rid of to D.I. I called my friend Josh to see if we could use his truck to make a D.I. run and then head up to Home Depot to buy some lumber for the shelves.

We then used my Dad's table saw and cut the lumber down to size and began assembling. Some of the assembling needed to be done in the attic because the shelves were too big to fit through the small attic door opening. What a treat on the back!I am proud to say the shelves are done and have made a big difference. My mom was grateful each milestone we made and each path that was cleared (above top left- mom and I dancing to celebrate that we COULD... IN THE now cleaner garage). I am still planning on helping them finish cleaning/organizing their garage and hopefully we will finish before the end of January.
I really enjoyed this project, I thought about Ryan a lot while working on it, and I also thought about what tough work Ed, Wayne, and Bill do daily as I was cutting lumber and working with my hands. It made me feel like I was one of the contractors of the family!

Merry Christmas Ryan! You are a great brother-in-law and friend. I love you a lot.