Cargo Largo Day!

Before I begin this post, I want to apologize for not having any progress pictures.  The truth is the whole incident was suppose to take less than 45 minutes so I didn’t think to grab the camera, but as with all things involving our new house it took longer than we planned and the longer it went the less interested I was in stopping to take pictures. 

Tuesday was Cargo Largo day.  For us that means Dan has found a number of great deals on his favorite ebay store’s website and since there are a lot and they are really heavy it just makes more sense for us to have someone deliver them to our house.  Once they are delivered Dan and I then have to maneuver them into our garage.  This particular Tuesday we had an air conditioner, cast-iron bathtub, large industrial toolbox and small industrial toolbox delivered.  The smaller tool box and air conditioner were light enough that we easily moved them into the garage.  However, the larger tool box and bath tub were quite heavy and required more time and effort.  It was also my b-day and we had plans to go out to dinner and celebrate.  As I mentioned before the whole task was only suppose to take 45 minutes...

To summarize a very long story (over 2 hours of fun), we had to attach casters to the bottom of Dan’s new large 900 lb industrial tool box, move it off the skid onto the driveway, get it into the garage over the large drop-off and then move the 400 lb cast-iron bathtub into the garage also over the drop-off. 

For those of you who haven't seen our house in person, the "drop-off" is a 6" elevation drop between our driveway and the garage floor.  It appears that the former owners had repeated layers of asphalt added to their driveway without ever removing the previous layer.  We plan to fix it once we start remodeling, but for now we just have to work around it. 

So back to the task of moving the stuff into the garage.  It was pretty much impossible to push either of these items across the floor because they weighed so much, so our great engineering idea was to have one of us lift one side of the item with a furniture dolly and then the other one would push and pull as much as possible.  This worked pretty well until we almost tipped the tool box over and it rolled off the side of the driveway and pinned me against our bushes.  Once we got it back on the driveway we then had to roll it over the drop-off.  We put together a terribly designed ramp from an extra skid and rolled/pushed/pulled it over the drop-off and into the garage.  I'm sure the neighbors across the street got a good laugh watching and listening to us throughout the whole ordeal.  We repeated the process of pushing and pulling for the bathtub and after two hours of frustration and exhaustion we finally had everything in the garage.  This of course is only the beginning the bathtub will have to be moved upstairs at some point and I'm already lobbying for us pay someone to do it. 

As for my birthday, it wasn't what I would consider a dream birthday, but Dan has assured me it is one that I'll never forget.  We did still make it to dinner, so no complaints here.