Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
By Saturday, we had moved almost everything out of the upper level. We moved Ben's bed (a single) down to the living room, and Sam had a bedroll tucked discreetly behind our living room couch, right where our dog used to sleep. All that was left upstairs was two desks, one in Ben's room and one in my office.
Ben's desk is pretty heavy, but compared to my office desk, it's an end table. My office desk is a huge L-shaped oak edifice. It was delivered about 10 years ago by two gentlemen who subsequently had to change their career path to accommodate spinal columns that now looked like crushed soda cans. Not wanting to suffer the same fate, I came up with a strategy that didn't involve bringing this behemoth any closer to sea level. It's simple, I told Sue when we were first considering the project. The desk is now the only piece of furniture in the loft. We'll move it to the center of the floor, cover it up, and the painters can work around it. Then, when the carpet installers come in, we'll budge the desk toward one wall, have them lay the carpet starting from the other side of the room, and move the desk over to the carpeted side when they reach the desk side. And, I added, we can do the same thing with the desk in Ben's room.
Sue didn't say anything, and as we all know, silence is a wife's way of saying she agrees wholeheartedly.
But now that we were at the point where the aforementioned desks were the only two non-gasping things left upstairs, Sue said, "You know, we have to move the desks downstairs. The painters and carpet layers don't need these things in their way while they work."
Thus ended over 33 years of marriage.
No, just kidding. The discussion followed the usual pattern... I carried on a bit, expressing, in turn, my indignation, consternation, exasperation, and, eventually my capitulation. Sue has the irritating habit of being right in the long run, and after I calmed down I realized that if I won the battle of the desks, the victory would be offset later, when we'd discover the dismembered corpse of our desk in our bathtub, or a desk-shaped lump underneath the new carpet. I was further persuaded to acquiesce when I was reminded that I had two grown sons that I could throw under the desk, so to speak.
Once Sam discovered the change in plans, he let us know he was scheduled for work at his paying job, and it was hard to discuss any scheduling alternatives over the screech of his tires. But Ben was still available. At first I thought he lacked the inherent craftiness that Sam had displayed, but it turned out he had invited his unsuspecting friend David (who has since left the country) to assist.
Together, the three of us managed to wrestle the desks down the stairs, in an agonizing, step-by-step process that, I can tell you from personal experience, would make a grown man weep. Later, after that upper story was done, Sam and Ben and I reversed the process. It was a life-changing experience for me. One of my favorite films used to be an old Laurel and Hardy short called The Music Box, where Stan and Ollie spend most of the picture hauling a piano up an incredibly long set of steps for delivery to a house at the top of a hill. I now realize that this was the only true-life drama that Laurel and Hardy ever made. I can always laugh at Ollie falling off a ladder or igniting a room full of natural gas, but I'm telling you, there's nothing funny about The Music Box.
Here's a picture of our garage with all the upstairs stuff in it:
That vacant area toward the right was reserved for my car and Ben's car, until we realized I don't have an eye for spatial relationships... then we decided to keep it available for the roll of carpet that would be left over after phase 1 and held in reserve for phase 2.
By that Sunday, the upstairs was ready, and we were able to stagger to church and thank God that... well, that the upstairs was ready and that we could stagger to church. I didn't have the foresight to snap any "before-and-after" pictures, but I did take some pictures of the upstairs level after it had been emptied. Here's a picture of the loft/home office area. It gives you an idea of the old carpet and paint. That's not Wall-E in center of the room... we had to keep our fax machine and internet modem connected through all the work. It was covered up and left in the middle of the room.
The following Monday through Thursday, we all just hung out downstairs while the painters, followed by the carpet layers, did their jobs. Except for the fact that Sam and Ben were sprawled like bear rugs in the living room, we could almost make believe that everything was normal. Here's an indication of how it looked:
Phase 2 was a different story. Like I said, after the upstairs had been completed on Thursday, we had to scramble to get everything out of the garage and back on the second story, then move all the lower level out of the house. This included our beloved La-Z-Boy furniture and the huge entertainment cabinet that houses our home theater set-up (seen in the picture above). Each presented unique challenges that will be addressed in the next exciting chapter.