I gave my husband 50 presents for his 50th birthday. I dug through memories of our years together to surprise him.

• I wanted my husband to have a memorable 50th birthday without going over budget.
• Weeks before his birthday, I cleaned out our storage unit to save some money and bought a present.
• I found fun memories in the storage boxes and I added more little presents to go with.

I was determined to make my husband's 50th birthday extraordinary on an ordinary budget.

I knew it would be an extra tough milestone for him. His parents died over a decade ago. His closest relative was a sister 2000 miles away. And after 23 years in Los Angeles, most of our friends had moved away or moved on. He works long hours and then comes home to his second shift as a dad to our disabled son.

He doesn't get celebrated very often. So, I wanted to make him feel special.

I emptied our storage unit

A few weeks before his birthday, in an effort to save $250 a month, we cleaned out our storage unit after 15 years and dragged everything home, leaving a mess of boxes and bags scattered around the house. I took my $250 savings and bought the record player he'd mentioned wanting months ago. It was on sale for $200. It was a nice gift. It was "enough," but it didn't feel that way.

Exhausted and overwhelmed from our day-to-day lives, I struggled to think of what else I could do to show him I loved him. My own depression and anxiety had been weighing on me heavily, but I was determined not to let it get in the way of a celebration that we all needed.

When I was out doing our regular grocery shopping, I started collecting smaller gifts like candy bars and his favorite chips and cookies to wrap up as extra gifts. I thought it would be fun for him to have more things to open.

I wanted to give him 50 presents

A vision emerged. What if he could open 50 presents? Even if the presents weren't all that impressive, at least my effort would be. I started wrapping up items around the house, like a package of toilet paper, an old tape measure (we own three and can never find any of them), and even a government-issued COVID test.

I still had a long way to go to make it to 50. I sat on our bedroom floor wrapping up a handful of leftover glowsticks from my son's birthday a few months earlier, surrounded by storage boxes, wondering where I was going to find 25 gifts for free. The answer was, of course, right in front of me.

I started sifting through the storage boxes, laughing and crying at the assortment of items we had somehow decided we absolutely had to hang on to over the course of our 22-year relationship. Everything seemed like a treasure — even the blurry picture ID I'd gotten from the check cashing place we used when our credit was too bad even to open a bank account. I found his mom's ceramic duck collection, a phone directory from the town he'd lived in when he was born 50 years earlier, and a non-working video camera I'd won on a game show.

I found so many memories

I met him at a bar on New Year's 2001. I never imagined our lives together would last into our 50s. The boxes from the storage facility were like time capsules filled with memories, both hilarious and heartbreaking.

A few days before his birthday, my husband asked why I'd ordered six rolls of wrapping paper, and I smirked and shrugged. The night before his birthdays, I locked myself in our bedroom for hours.

I wrapped up my 15-year-old acting headshot from the days when I'd tried to "make it" in Hollywood.

I wrapped up the MapQuest directions he'd printed out to find his way to the job he's still working at today.

I wrapped up the police report of his car being stolen. We didn't have the money to get it out of impound and ended up taking the bus for seven years after that. Now, we each have our own car — they're not new or fancy, but if we could have told the younger, bus-riding versions of ourselves that we had our own cars, we would have thought we ended up rich.

He was shocked

When he saw his 50 gifts on his birthday morning, he was shocked.

His birthday turned out better than any Christmas we'd spent together. He loved the record player and the candy. He loved the glowing year-end review he'd received from his boss in 2009. And, of course, everyone loves toilet paper.

"Ahhh! A tape measure!" he exclaimed at gift #40. "Where did you find it?" he asked.

Every time he opened a gift, we reminisced. "Oh my God, remember MapQuest?" we laughed. "How were we driving around while looking at pieces of paper?"

Digging deep into the bottom of a cracked plastic bin, I found the piece de resistance for the final gift — #50. It was a VHS screener copy of the made-for-TV movie "Last of the Blonde Bombshells." He and his best friend used to hide it in each other's apartments to make each other look like dorks if they were having a date come over. I made sure it was the last gift that he opened. He was doubled over laughing.

In the end, I did go over budget on gifts. I splurged on a gourmet dinner at one of the fanciest restaurants in the city and put the bill on a credit card. Then I tucked my copy of the receipt away in a drawer at home, already saving up gifts for his 60th birthday down the road.