I realize I never did a write up on the second part of moving. Cut for length.
The morning of the Big Push, captainecchi, electric_d_monk, and natbudin came out early, and we went to breakfast together. Then I went to pick up the truck while they went back to the house along with asdr83 and packed up more items. _dragonwolf_ came back out along with bgabin, and the 6 of us were able to load up the truck pretty well.The first challenge (before _dragonwolf_ and bgabin got there) was the couch. This was the couch that only barely made it -in- to the old apartment. When we moved in there the professional (in the sense that they got paid for it. I’m not sure they were that seasoned and doing it as a career.) movers were talking about having to remove a large window and hoist the couch through that. Fortunately it didn’t come to that when we moved in, and moving out was at least faster, if not necessarily any smoother. It took a time or two to reorient the couch, and many Dirk Gently references were made, and we took out a corner of the upstairs wall (one that was full of holes when we’d moved in, and that the landlord had poorly repaired at best) in the process, but it did get out. Everything else got out pretty well, but it was a substantive amount of work, and I can’t thank our help enough.
Getting everything in went pretty quickly as most of the stuff had been taken care of the week prior. Boxes were strewn about a bit, so there was some shoving around of things to get the furniture in, but it went in, and mostly in the right places. The ground floor entrance, more modern construction with wide stairs and hallways, and the centralized floor plan made it easy to move even the couch in. The adventure on the -in- part of the process (the couch was the -out- part) was the dryer. Our apartment is half of ranch that wasn’t originally a two family unit, but has had additions and modifications over the years. So the stairs to the basement aren’t original, and have a doorway that was the exact right fit for the washer… but the dryer has this exhaust port on the back, and it sticks out from the dryer less than half an inch, just enough for you to fit an exhaust hose around and clamp down. This made the dryer perhaps a quarter of an inch too wide to fit down, partly because of a well anchored railing on one side of the stairs. There just wasn’t enough clearance on the door frame on the other side. At first we thought about hammering down the vent (at which point asdr83 went and had a stress-induced nap), but eventually we found that we could go through the basement to the landlord’s half and open up their back door to the basement. While prowling around we woke up the landlord’s boyfriend. He was a bit gruff at first (having just been woken up), but he put some pants on and came out and around to help out. We were able to shove a few things around and get the dryer in. Hooray!
Towards the end of the evening I returned the truck and we went back to the old apartment to rescue the cats (since the bed was now at the new place we were in truth living there and weren’t going to leave the cats without us), and a few odds and ends, like the TV (because it is new and expensive; we wouuldn’t have anything to hook it up to for another week). We pull in to the old place to find out that there is a party going on with our Frat neighbors (no longer! hah!) downstairs. And not only that, but as we are pulling up the driveway, there’s a guy standing and peeing on the side of our steps. Seriously, who does that? Even after we honked we had to wait for him to do up his fly and get out of the way. Egads. I yelled at him when we got out. Made us even more glad to be getting out of there. He wasn’t the only one either. Another guy was spotted peeing in our front bushes too. Ok, I know when you have 50-60 people over drinking and living it up the single bathroom can form quite a line. Still. Go pee on your own half, or at least the backyard. Yuck. Fortunately for us, the cops came up (they’d been called before and not responded, so it was nice they responded that night when someone called them) and started breaking things up. (We were moving out the TV at that moment, and I was a touch concerned that they might wonder where we were going with such a valuable piece of equipment…) So I went up to them and thanked them very much for breaking things up, and that there had been a few other parties that had gotten out of hand, and that I was glad to be moving to Maynard. We had to wait for them to finish escorting people back to their cars and to move their cruisers so we could get out of the driveway, and then I had to wait while the cops doubled-back to make sure people weren’t drifting back in to the party.
The next two weeks were spent variously cleaning the old place, moving things around the new place, arguing about both places, patching the wall that we’d taken out (I probably left it in better shape than when we broke it), and trying to not go crazy. Fortunately, I took some time off from work which meant we could get everything emptied out of the old place and cleaned up before the end of the month. Sadly, I made the mistake of not loading my outdoor grill into the truck when we had it, which led to me driving down the road with my hatch open and a grill half sticking out, strapped in with a packing strap and asdr83 driving along behind me, and calling me to say “Hey, something black just fell out. I think you lost a knob.” I rightly guessed though that it was just a briquet, and all knobs were intact.
Also in that time we took a weekend away and went to Star Island for a folk dance weekend. It was a really nice time, and I’m glad we were able to do it. The Sunday we came back from that was also our one year anniversary, and we had a lovely anniversary dinner at The Wayside Inn (wayside.org). Since then there’s also been a Boston Babydolls show, a trip to the Topsfield Fair, and plenty else to keep up busy. So we’re still unboxing and settling in, but it’s actually not going too badly, and down the road we’ll be announcing a housewarming party so everyone can come see the new place (well, except for those who helped us move who have already seen it). Maynard’s not as inconvenient a town to get to as it sounds, so we’ll be looking forward to seeing you all there.
