this is reid

I went back to moving big stuff and the big bench is nothing if not big. This monster is 42″ deep, 10′ long, and 2″ thick. It used to be part of a bowling alley, and I remember that, back in the day, I used to just pick it up and carry it where I wanted it. Well today, when I wrestled it off the base, it went where it wanted to go, and I’m only glad I wasn’t in its way. I loaded a lot of other stuff on top and tied it down. What I’d forgotten was to fasten the trailer ball. I got all the way down the hill before this occurred to me, and I pulled over to check. Sure enough, nothing but gravity was holding the trailer on the ball. So another close call was averted with a healthy dose of luck. Thank you Jesus.

With no more metal projects in Westford, it was time to move the mill. This was a little more exciting than it needed to be, beginning when I had it rolling on pipes, only to find that the head was too high to roll out the door of the metal shop. I had to either cut thru the wall or remove the J-head. I went for the J-head. Like the big bench, this is a heavy sucker, and I’m not quite sure how I got the head on the machine in the first place, but I know I lack the strength to safely lift if off. So I loosened the bolts, rigged the hoist on some blocking screwed to the ceiling, and lifted it. The blocking cracked under the weight, and the head dropped back down onto the loose bolts. Lucky it didn’t fall off. So I took a chain, wrapped it around the head, with the other hook clipped loosely onto the beam. Then I got on top of the mill like I’m riding a horse and worked the head off of the long bolts, knowing that, when it came off, I would only have to lower it about 6″ until it would be dangling on the chain from the beam. A good plan except that, when it finally came off the bolts, the chain hook also fell off the beam, with me holding the head awkwardly from my perch atop the mill. I managed to re-hook the beam and transfer the weight. Another close call! It took another 45 minutes to roll the thing to the edge of the deck, and then hoisted it as far as it would go, backed the trailer underneath it, and lowered it onto the bed. Whew. I decided that, instead of securing the load with strapping, I would just bolt it to the bed of the trailer, and even found that I had plenty of 10″ bolts on hand, but only 3 nuts and 3 washers, as the bolt cabinet was already in Stu. I decided 3 bolts would be good enough, loaded a handful of other small stuff, and hit the road with a PB&J sandwich in hand and Mary following behind.

I headed for Stu while Mary took the truck to the Green house. I got the rolling beams in place and the portable crane set up, and a stranger showed up on his bicycle to chat and gawk. I put him to work just like I did the Old Guy with the lathe. Even though the crane was set up on concrete blocks and a 4×4, it was still just barely high enough to raise the mill off the trailer. Just barely is still good enough, though, and we managed to pull the trailer out from under it and set it down on rollers on the beams. From there, it was pretty easy to roll it into Stu. Stu is chuck full now.  I need to start collecting hand tools instead of massive ones!

Four more days, four more loads. I emptied out Chuck and put up a new mailbox.

We were getting down to the wire, and for the first time since I retired, I took the whole week off. Is there something wrong with this picture? I hired a flatbed to move Chuck, our shipping container, to the new house. He made it look easy at both ends of the move, but he’d warned me that his tires slip on grass. Once Chuck was unloaded, he gunned it to get some speed going up the lawn, and one wheel spun out, tearing a brown double swath into the grass. For 15 minutes and no extra charge, he told me stories about his adventures as a tow truck driver, and then he headed home.

More packing and still more. I  went thru my files looking for documentation I should leave with the new owners. I wound up with a pretty sizeable stack. As I sorted thru the drawers, I eventually was left with a pile of rolled up engineering drawings. “Scrolls,” I thought. I’m an archaeologist, and my oldest documents are scrolls.

The details needed attention. I almost fell for a craigslist scammer responding to my ad to sell my power tools, but caught myself. The house appraisal came in and it was $10k lower than the selling price.  We had a big discussion about whether to split the difference or just agree to the reduction and decided to just suck it up and get the whole thing over with. Between the busy road, the dated appliances, the wetlands, &c, even an optimistic appraiser couldn’t justify the $345K price. So we reduced it. My old mortgage discharge had been recorded on the wrong in the town vault. My woodshed appeared to be a zoning violation. The buyers’ financing missed another deadline. And the electrician had left behind some dead circuits. My to-do list got interesting.

I decided I couldn’t safely move the tractor, the mower, the brush hog and the backhoe all at once, so moving the backhoe became another adventure.

That night, we sat on the deck for awhile, musing about how this is “the last time” we’d be doing so. Just like we’d mused about so much else recently. But it is getting real now: If all goes well, tomorrow night will be the last night I will sleep in Westford. It’s a little scary, yes, but it’s a good thing on so many levels. I am blessed.

Saturday was to be a big day, and we started off with a trip to the dump, where I managed to shatter a 6′ pane of glass all over myself while putting it in the hopper. Then off to the AT&T store where, hands fresh from a dump run, I tried out smart phones. All the DSL lines were taken in Morrisville, and we were scrambling for broadband, so tethering to a smart phone looked like our best hope. I can’t hear on most smart phones because processor noise crackles in the telecoil, but we found a Windows phone I could use. Windows. Me. Gawd. We picked up a rental truck at Penske and headed home.

While Mary attended a shower for Teresa,  I revved up and started loading the truck. I got the A-frame, the spiral, the couch, and the wavy table put in, and then surrounded them with ‘little things’ like drawers and boxes. Added the granite tables, took apart the queen bed and moved the mattress downstairs, and then moved 4 dressers and drawers down the stairs, plus the TV filing cabinet. Packed up the upstairs bookcases and collected all the “flats” from the walls, and then hooked up the trailer and loaded it with the BBQ, desktop from the cave, the filing cabinets, and the plywood shop drawers. Jockeyed the truck away from the house, and backed the trailer into the garage for overnight, and then had myself some well-deserved leftovers. Long day.

 Sunday, I started off by adding to the trailer load: Dining room table, easy chairs, adirondack chairs, an endless stream of end tables. Celia and Chris showed up to help with the Grand Finale of the moving marathon. Chris and I moved the headboards and king mattress downstairs, and into the truck. Mary and Celia packed cushions and smaller boxes around the big stuff. It was a full truck by the time we shut the door. We loaded flats and the TV into the tahoe. The TV couch and the dining chairs into the Tacoma. And set out in a caravan for Mville. No excitement getting there. We got some initial stuff unloaded, and then I dropped the tarp to expose the old stairwell hole. We lifted the king headboard straight up thru the hole in the ceiling and sideways under the turnbuckle chains into the bedroom. Same for the mattress. Everything went smoothly. Chris was a machine, lifting heavy things like I used to do. A very nice, easy-going, hard-working man. We took a break, loaded Celia’s stuff into the truck, and then headed back to Westford and then took 4 cars into Burlington, unloaded Celia’s stuff into her apartment, took showers, dropped off the empty truck, and met at the Windjammer for dinner.

Home is where the cats are, and we stopped in Westford to pick them up. Lucy was traumatized even before she went in the box. Mary was traumatized listening to Lucy crying all the way to Morrisville. BZ just set to work gnawing his way out of the his box. I just shut up and drove. We got home, let them out, and I passed out on the couch from many days of hard work.

It wasn’t quite over:  a couple more trailer loads made the trip and we cleaned and weeded the whole place so there would be nothing for the new owners to complain about.  The closing went smoothly, and I got a nice fat check for my trouble.

The Gods, however, were not happy: There were high winds and lightning bolts in Milton the night before the closing, and the lightning tripped the new GFI breakers they’d made me install. The new owners spent their first night in Westford without water.

In Morrisville, I took a shower and looked forward to new adventures.

The next day, I sold my other metal lathe. $600 on craigslist, which is a lot less than I paid for it, but it sure taught me a lot.  One less thing to move and store, and even now, 2 months later, I’m still working thru the wad of hundreds in my wallet. There’s something about cash that checks and cards can’t match.

Today’s trailer load is garbage. Stuff that’s been easier to store than to throw out. And now that we’ve got a big roll-off box, it’s just as easy to cart it to Morrisville as it is to cart it to the dump.   The trailer has a slow leak. Every day, we pump it up, and overnight, it leaks flat. Today, it was flat by noon, and we found a crack in the valve stem.  I pumped it up again and brought along a tank of air. We drove over, unloaded, and got right to work.

I took out screws on the underside of the floor while mary took out ringnails upstairs. Then I got the catsclaw and pulled the big nails holding the floor down. The square nails only leave a dimple, which got filled, over the years, with dirt and crud, and then sealed in when they painted the floor. On my hands and knees and grunting over every single nail after nail after nail. Great exercise. And then Mary followed me with the big crowbar, pulling the half-pulled nails. Square  nails squeak, crying in protest when you pull them out.   Hundreds of sheetrock screws on the underside. Hundreds of 4″ and square nails on the top side. Hundreds of sheetrock nails on the underside. Hundreds of ringnails on the top side. All gone.

I’ve had a lot of bad things to say about this house over the years. But to it’s credit, it is Old. And you don’t get to be that old without you’re either good or lucky. Mary says there’s been a structure here since the 1790’s. And this floor and these beams are the oldest part of the house. It’s like they’re artifacts, and I’m plundering the site.  It makes me wonder: We’re building this modern house with engineered lumber, whose strength comes largely from adhesives. 200 years from now, will it still stand?

The tire was flat again when we were ready to leave, and the tank of spare air we’d brought had also leaked away, but we decided it wasn’t so flat that we couldn’t make it home, with a stop at the creemee stand mid-trip “to check on the tire.”  

I got to thinking: what if the only reason the house hadn’t fallen down was because the floor added so much rigidity to it. Without nails – without a floor – would it fall down? I don’t think this is the case, because it has a lot of diagonal bracing built into it, but what if ?? So I bought some turnbuckles and chains and drilled holes in every other post and tied them snug so that, when I took out the interior walls, the roof wouldn’t fall down. This involved a lot more lath and plaster and sheetrock and studs – all ‘down the hole’ into yet another pile in the living room.  We carted it all out to the ROB.

So the floor was loose, and the walls were gone and the turnbuckles were tight and all that was left to do was take out the floor boards and cut down the beams. Then clean up, tarp the holes, and move in. All in 3 weeks. I chickened out. I’d had this gnawing feeling that I was in over my head and decided that the thing to do was to just clean up and move in. Does this seem obvious to you, too ?? What was I thinking?

I put a FREE sign on my lawn mower and left it on the driveway. Never saw it again. We had a yard sale at the Mill and made about $200.  

And we cleaned up. On cleaning day, the plan was to get going first thing, and clean all day.  So we got there about 11am. This is one of those things I love/hate  about Mary: she is slow getting going in the morning. But then, if she were always ready to go at 5am and giving me trouble for getting up late, that wouldn’t be OK either, so what we’ve got works. And besides, who can’t use an extra cup of coffee in the morning?

She vacuumed and mopped and I took out the rugs in the stairs and bedroom. More stuff for the roll-off box.  And by the end of the day, we were ready to start moving in.

By now, it makes us laugh that we ever agonized over whether to spring for the big roll-off box. The final bill was for about 5000# of debris. And that’s without the wood we took out of the place, which we piled in a big pyre. All we need is a dead body.

Some day soon, there’s going to be a party, and we’ll have a bonfire.

The plan is to take the money from the Westford sale, use it to build a modern house on the back pasture in Morrisville while living next door in the Green House, and then tear down the Green House. This sounds foolish and extravagant sometimes, and I have to remind myself that the place is just plain falling apart. There’s no way I’m going to spend my golden years fighting a losing battle with the fixer-upper from Hell.

And yet Mary has a sentimental attachment to the place, and it makes sense to salvage and re-use what we can. Mary is tuned in to reclaimed wood, and the living room ceiling beams and upstairs flooring were said to be the genuine 200 year old articles. When hauling load after trailer load of stuff to Morrisville became routine, we decided to take a hard look at how much, and what kind of wood was available. 

So I got my flat bar and a hammer and I ripped out a chunk of ceiling. Behind the sheetrock was … more sheetrock.  I ripped out another chunk, and behind it was … gorgeous, wide, aged boards.  I looked at her, and she looked at me, and we knew we wanted these in the new house.

And they’re free!!  Unless you count labor. I know I’m not good at estimating how long a project is going to take, but I should have known better than to think I could get them down before we moved in. But you never finish what you never start, and I started the next day.

It took me less than a day to pull down most of the sheetrock in the living room, working above my head on a broken step ladder.

It took me another day to remove the upstairs rugs and rip up the underlayment covering the original floor boards. This was a bitch: There were ring-nails in hardwood on a 6″ grid, and Time had rusted them into place. Every Single Piece of underlayment had to be pried up and rrrripped away. Every Single nail head pulled thru the masonite, leaving a 1/4″ projection to tear my pants and bloody my knees. 

I “took a break” and went back to hauling trailer loads of junk to Morrisville. At this point, there was a mess of broken sheetrock on the floor downstairs, and a mess of broken underlayment upstairs, and we had 6 weeks to move in. Well Mary has allergies and doesn’t like dust. And if we’re going to re-use these beams and boards, then they’re going to have to come out now or later. And if we take them out later, while we’re living downstairs, there’s going to be dirt Everywhere, and someone is going to die. So Now is the time.

Again, I’m not good at estimating how long a project is going to take, but I should have known better than to think I could get those beams down and still have time to move in by Memorial day.  But I got started the next day.

You can’t remove the beams until you remove the floor. You can’t remove the floor until you remove the interior partitions. You can’t remove the interior partitions until you’ve made sure the roof won’t collapse. And you can’t be sure about the roof until you’ve taken off some sheetrock.  So guess where I started? I opened up an old hole in the ceiling about 3 feet square and started throwing stuff through it. Doors. Shelves. Trim. Sheetrock. Lath. Plaster. Insulation. Studs. All of it: down the hole.

It sounds stupid, but I needed some convincing to realize that we needed a roll-off box. And both of us needed some convincing to realize that we needed a big one. We’ve seen that my own forte is making a mess. Well, Mary is very good at cleaning up, and we made plans to get rid of the pile. 

On 4/27, I loaded the trailer, ate breakfast,  put air in the trailer tire, lashed everything down, and we were off.

 
At the green house, the pile in the living room was still there. We opened the  back end of the roll-off box and set up some ramps. For 4 hours, Mary worked the small pieces and the wheelbarrow, while I moved the wood and the large pieces. Mary made sure that we were loading the roll-off box neatly and as high as possible and slowly, it filled up. Without a break, we totally got rid of the pile. Then we started making another pile. I set Mary to work pulling nails upstairs while I removed screws from the undersides of 2 sections of beam. I pulled more masonite and sheetrock from the hall+closet area near celia’s room and dumped everything down the hole. And then hauled it all outside.

Finally, we decided to take up one floorboard, just to make sure that there Really Is something good down there that we were going thru all this trouble to harvest. It was beautiful. By this time, Mary was having a hard time breathing, so we headed home. What a woman!

Having moved the lathe, the rest was going to be easy. The very next day, Stu looked like this.

And day by day, more loads of stuff got moved.

Sunday: Pipes, hardwood, plywood, canoe, trellis

Monday: kalamazoo saw, shop drawers

Tuesday: firewood and tractor tires.

There was some discussion about what to do with the firewood: Take it, or offer to sell it to the new owners. In the end, we sold the cut+split+stacked wood with the house, not least because the stacks leaned against the garage wall, and that stretch of wall had not had its siding replaced. I gave them a really sweet deal on it.

The un-split pile of logs, we decided to take with us. You want to know the original reason I built my gantry CNC router table? I’ve always wanted to digitize my ass and use CNC to carve a duplicate into an ash log. “Asses to Ashes”, if you will. And when Gary Koch gave me all those perfect ash logs, I knew there were no random events in the Universe. So I kept the pile of ash firewood, but the only way I know how to digitize my ass is to stick my finger in it.  Gotta work on that. 

Wednesday:

2 more loads of firewood.

15″ Harrison lathe. Weighs 1 ton

I’d start with the big stuff, I figured. And the biggest thing I own is my lathe, a 15″ Harrison said to weigh 3000#. The Blue Monster, and if I can move It, I can move anything.

First you get it up on pipes so it can roll. Then you roll it to the door.

 Then you raise the rollers to clear the threshold.

Then you cross the threshold, transfer the weight onto a pair of I-beams on the patio, and roll it out.

Then you build a hoist frame around it and strap it in. Then you hoist it up so you can back the trailer underneath it.

You watch at close range as a tearing sound rips the air and the ground beneath your feet shifts suddenly to the left. The lathe fell to the ground, looked at me and said “I ain’t going.” Fortunately, I was unhurt, but if this is just Day 1 of my moving project, how long before That changes?

So I righted the lathe, ditched the hoist frame and rigged the deck with a higher, stronger hoist.

I raised it, and this time it held. I backed up the trailer underneath it.

Compared to that, it was no problem to load the safe and beams, strap it all down and drive to the STU with it. A very nervous ride, watching the mirror the whole way. 

I set up at the STorage Unit with the beams on the ground, the trailer on the beams, the hoist frame on the trailer, and the lathe on the hoist.  All this attracted the attention of an old guy on a bicycle riding by, and he couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. I interviewed him and put him to work. His job was to get on the trailer and stand, at arm’s length, steadying the lathe as it dangles from the hoist chain, making sure it doesn’t twist in the wind or catch on anything as I drove the trailer out from under it. He did a great job, and we lowered the lathe onto the beams. We rolled it on pipes up to the door, transferred onto the concrete floor, and rolled it to the back of the STU.  The safe was easy, but, for the Old Guy, probably just as interesting.  Thanks, Old Guy, wherever you are.

I closed up the Stu and got a cold drink. I am so fortunate.

We put my house on the market on March 1, after spending what seemed like all winter touching it up. Within a month, it was sold. The couple who bought it are a pair of  IBM engineers moving from Texas. They have horses and needed room for them. My house was not on the short list prepared by their broker, but they saw the sign while cruising the countryside and inquired about it. I am so fortunate.

I lived in Westford for about 25 years. Westford was good to me. I put a lot of work into that place, but it’s time.

The closing is scheduled for May 30, which seems like a long time in the future, but I’ve got a lot of stuff to move, so I got started right away.