Previously on Letters From The Loft...
We had decided to have the interior of stately Thornton manor painted and re-carpeted, and the kitchen refurbished with a cabinet makeover, and new floors, countertop and lighting. At the end of the last chapter, we were now at the point in the remodeling process where the upper story had been completed (including returning all the displaced furnishings) and we were starting phase 2: emptying out the ground floor. Click here for the whole story.
Our La-Z-Boy furniture consists of five huge modular reclining chairs. Two of them connect together to make a loveseat; the other three, along with a couple of arm units, fit together to make what one might call a sofa (in the sense that one might call a HumVee a "buggy"). These things were too big to fit through our front door. When they were delivered, they were lifted over our back yard fence and brought in through the sliding glass doorway that serves as a rear entrance to our living room. I'm sure that the guys who delivered these padded monoliths soon wound up in the same support group as the guys who delivered my desk.
In retrospect, I guess, it says a lot about your self-image if you want to buy yourself a piece of furniture called a La-Z-Boy. Obviously, a person who wants to sit in a La-Z-Boy, almost by definition, doesn't want to move one. But necessity overcame nature and we managed to get the chairs out into our backyard patio. In the place where my chair had been, there was a pile of surplus popcorn that, over the years, had managed to miss my mouth and had fallen through the cushions, but a rented earth-mover made short work of that. We covered the La-Z-Boys up with a bunch of plastic and stared wistfully at them for the week they were out there.
Other than the La-Z-Boys, a couple of end tables, and a couple of cabinets that house my DVD collection, the entertainment center is the only other piece of furniture in our living room, and it's the most imposing piece. It's also made of oak (I'm thinking balsa wood for any future furniture purchases) and houses our 50" TV and all its accoutrements: amplifier, TV receiver box, dvd player, and more DVDs. Through the back of it runs enough cable to wire up CNN. Its weight is about half that of my office desk (in other words, about 7 tons) and it rolls on 6 casters of the quality found on your average Fisher-Price vehicle. My plan was to disconnect the wiring, remove the TV, and roll the whole piece and its remaining contents out the front door and into the garage.
This operation ran smoothly until we hit the speed bump that is our front door threshold. The casters wouldn't just roll over this imposing strip of metal, so Ben had to lift one end of the cabinet while I nudged the other in order to make any forward progress. We got the first set of casters over the hump, but we had to lift it again for the middle set, shifting most of the cabinet's weight to the casters now resting on the concrete walkway outside the house. That's when we blew a tire. One caster let out a death scream and shattered into little pieces that were later gathered for a tasteful closed coffin service honoring one who fell in the line of duty.
Now we had a giant block of oak plugging up our front doorway, see-sawing back and forth on the threshold, and we didn't have access to the small regiment it would take to lift this thing off its casters and muscle it on out to the garage. So after having a good cry, I made my way out our back door, over the tarp-covered La-Z-Boys, through our back yard gate, and hopped into my car for a trip to Costco, which happened to have household dollies on sale. Costco features a lot of seasonal merchandise, and apparently this was the season for moving objects that are not meant to be moved. The dollies were reasonably priced, but frankly, Costco could have demanded the deed to my house and sealed the deal. Other than my wedding ring and the OB/GYN bills for my two sons, this was the best purchase I've ever made.
When I got back home, Ben was still faithfully balancing the cabinet at our front door, so we slipped one dolly under the outside end, rolled the thing forward, slipped the other dolly under the other end, and managed to postpone our end-zone victory dance until we had successfully wheeled Godzilla into the garage. When all the moving was eventually done, I placed the dollies in the Hall of Fame section of my garage, next to the screwdriver attachment for my power drill and that gadget that lets you reach behind furniture to pick up stuff. Later that day, I picked up a replacement caster at Lowe's (which is Home Depot with everything orange painted blue) and set it aside, making a note to myself to install it sometime later that week, after I had regained the full use of my arms and legs.
(A brief aside: I know the question you're all asking: Chuck, why didn't you and Ben just use the Forearm Forklift, those amazing carrying straps you see advertised on TV that allow two people to move nuclear-reactor-sized appliances using the magic of leverage? As a matter of fact, I have a set of these, and we did attempt to use them. As usual, though, the TV commercials leave out a couple of important facts: 1) they're not much use in moving things downstairs, where the guy on the lower end of the load can easily be leveraged into oblivion by the weight shift; and 2) you still have to have forearms like Popeye in order to muscle any item that was manufactured from a grove of oak trees.)
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton