Moving Day

7:00 AM: It has warmed up to 14 degrees a little windy but the sun is out. It could definitely be worse. We hired professional movers to take care of all the heavy stuff and get as much as possible into the 24’ moving truck. We were told that for a 3bed 2 bath 1600 Sq. Ft. bath home everything should fit in a 24’ truck and take three hours to load and two hours to unload based on history. Well that was before we they moved us. 4 hours later the truck was completely full and there was still enough stuff counting the contents of garage and garden shed to do a second trip. Luckily we were only moving 1 ½ miles away and had several weeks before the tenant would be moving into our existing house.
My sister, brother-n-law and their two kids came to help us and watch Eli while we packed furiously. They came over the day before to help pack and my brother-n-law came to the new house to help me do some work. We needed to replace several supply lines as the house was empty for about two years with the water shut-off; so seals and valve seats had become hard and brittle and developed leaks. The downstairs toilet flapper needed to be replaced as it would not seal at all. We replaced the vintage upstairs toilet with an inexpensive new one as I did not trust the copper lined wooden tank. (I am storing this toilet to be re-installed after a restoration someday) The shower in the parlor bathroom area drain had been leaking into the basement so I just removed the shower nozzle and capped it off as our plan is to abandon the shower on this floor anyway and it is not likely to have been original to the home. This got the house mostly functioning for living in. The boiler was not yet operational. This was Sunday and the previous owner had removed the space heaters (after the house recorded at the county) on Friday. I had oil delivered on Saturday and the fill guy said he would get the boiler going for me as I had it tested as part of the inspection and it worked then. He tried and tried but it would not keep running as he said there was air in the lines from having the oil tank pumped empty and cleaned before adding fresh oil. After a half hour of trying to bleed the system he gave up and left I shrugged it off as I had technician coming out on Tuesday anyway to service the boiler. We would just have to bundle up without heat on the main floor and basement (remember there are electric wall units in the bedrooms upstairs)
Back to moving. The movers showed up after having lunch (and not disappearing as I had feared) and began to bring in our contents into the even colder house as the door was constantly open. First step was to set-up my sons room so he would have a place to sleep and then set-up our bedroom. Problem #1 our queen box spring would not go up the stairs as the stairs made a 180 degree turn a few steps up. Problem #2 the tall dresser we have would not make that corner either. The movers were getting clearly exhausted and we opted to put it in the parlor for now and figure out a solution later. Some other unfortunate incidents happened during the move-in. My antique safe that I had acquired from an estate sale had to be brought up several steps from the street to get in the front door. First the movers hooked straps to it and tried lifting it they got it up but one of them could not keep it up. (He was the bigger guy too) so they heaved it on a dolly and tried pushing it up the steps. No go; so they asked for help from me and my brother-n-law. The two of us pulling and the two movers pushing we made it up the steps into the house but a section of the brick steps lost its hold and collapsed, which made for fun navigating future boxes up the steps. The next mishap was my vintage refrigerator that I had modified into the “beer fridge”. This unit was also pretty heavy they had no trouble carrying it with straps but it would not go down the basement steps from the kitchen so it would have to go down the steps to the basement from outside. The steps down were too narrow for the fridge to go down so the next solution was to lift it down from above (without their straps) bypassing the steps. The weight of the fridge was just too much for these lads and the fridge came crashing down from an estimated drop of 4’ denting the door and tweaking the door frame so it would not seal anymore. After up righting and squeezing it through the door I plugged it in and what do you know it still works. One of our filing cabinets was basically destroyed I have no idea how that happened. The movers finished up, we wrote them a check and I wondered if proper etiquette says you should give a tip. Call me a bastard but they didn’t get one after busting our stuff.
The house now with just the three of us all exhausted sitting on our sofa with no heat and no resemblance of a feeling of home other then the sofa itself gave us an unsettling feeling. This was rectified quickly by a trip to get some Chinese take-out and some friends came by for some needed counsel. The house with all the doors shut warmed up to an even 48 degrees. A tad better then outside which was in the teens. We went to bed and hoped the pipes didn’t freeze.