Sunday, June 24, 2007

How to move (or not to) a piano

The first leg of the moving of my family is finished....mainly just my brother's stuff...but that in itself is big.

Friday morning I had scheduled movers to be at the house in Price at 9am to move the piano from downstairs and some of my brother's boxes onto the Uhaul that I had rented. (Upon reflection of driving the Uhaul, I think that I could be a truck driver...I was kinda sad to see it go.) Wait....let me back up a bit...I picked up the Uhaul Thursday afternoon and in the evening we had a couple of friends of Jimmy's help move the last of the belongings of my departed Uncle Don out of my parents storage shed. Teenage moving help is very cheap....we paid them in pizza. Granted, I hate the physical labor of moving...but this time my driving knee had decided to hate me and was giving out. And in the moving department, I was fairly useless beyond my order-barking skills. Anyway, at the end of the evening I realized that we didn't have any rope to tie down anything that we put in the truck. So Friday morning I was up at 6:30, showered dressed, hobbled to the grocery store for breakfast treats, then hobbled to Walmart to buy rope to tie the furniture down....when I went downstairs at 8:20 and my brother wasn't packing I had to wake him up and impress upon him the importance of getting to work.... otherwise known as I told him that he needed to get his butt into gear and not to argue with me because I couldn't take any more Aleve without dropping dead and my knee still hurt.

So by 9am, I was ready to take on the world.

And at 9am. There were no movers.
9:15 am- No Movers
9:20 am- No Movers and I am coming up with inventive slurs against the absent movers.
9:28 am- My mom offers to call the movers...a pre-emptive measure for their benefit really. The older gentlemen...who I think owns the company....tells my mom that "the old codger" -meaning himself- had written the reservation down wrong and the moving crew was in a neighboring town. He tells my mom that they are on their way and then he hangs up. From my conversation with him before hanging up before the conversation finishes is a standard operating procedure for this guy.

So I call back....busy...and I procede to redial, redial, and redial until it was not busy anymore. Using the fact that my mom and I sound the same on the phone I told him that we had been disconnected. His response "that seems to be happening more and more lately". Translation: I don't know how to work my own telephone. He then tells me that he should probably take our information down ----this being AFTER my mom has given her address and phone number twice in the last phone conversation.

Me: "Ok, we live at 2-6-5 North..."
Old Man: "2....."
Big sigh "2- 6-5 North..."
"5 Northhh...."
" 1-4-0-0 West"
"1..... ?"
"1.......4........0..........0............W...........E..........S.........T"
It went on like this for several minutes when all the while I really wanted to be spelling out to him: F......u........c........k.........Y........o.........u.........

The movers finally arrived at 10am, frazzled, and definitely not wanting to be there. I am glad that my brother was there because he ended up having to help them move the piano up the stairs as the three of them were not enough. And as for being "experienced" with moving pianos...they weren't.

My mom told me not to look...but I did. Instead of dead-lifting it level up the stairs like you are supposed to do, they had it on its sides on a dolly that they were slamming up stair by stair by stair. I am still not sure where the paint that is now on the piano came from...and the carpet on the stairs is ruined. I guess that it is good that they new buyers of the house are going to be replacing it.

The van was finally loaded at 11, which was when I wanted to leave....but by the time we were able to secure everything and get Jimmy's visitors to leave it was 11:45 by the time I hit the road. Mom and Jimmy were supposed to be leaving a half hour behind me, but I was in Salt Lake (a two hour drive) and they still hadn't left. When they weren't calling me I knew that something was up, so I called them. It was like two kids being caught being naughty by mom....neither of them wanted to call me to tell me that they hadn't left yet...and neither of them wanted to face my wrath.

The piano movers on the Salt Lake end were scheduled to arrive between 2-4. I had told them 3 but the insisted on giving me a window. They were on time (3 o'clock!) and completely professional. They didn't complain, they did their job wonderfully, and they every gave the piano a quick check-over to let me know that it was still fairly well in tune and that everything was working correctly. That was the best, stress-free, $105 I have ever spent. These guys dead lifted the piano like it was nothing! It was amazing!

This left me with having to move my Great-Grandmother's Hutch into the house with my bum knee and well....me. Luckily Libby and Joe were able to get off of work early to come and help me. After that was finished we met my mom and Jimmy at the storage unit to unload the rest of the stuff.

As a quick aside...our storage unit, happily located in the land of storage units aka West Valley City, is run by a strange woman. She kept reminding me in a monotone voice "not to run a meth-lab out of your unit, you cannot live in your storage unit, you cannot operate any kind of business out of your unit...." When I asked her how often that happened she simply stated that there was a reason it was all in the contract and proceeded to remind me that two of her tenants were cops....as if I would be running the next meth lab. She had some problems with perception there....but then again, she asked if Jimmy was my son..which presents oh so many problems with how old I must look.

Overall I am very happy that this first part is over. Now I am at the parent's house for the last time. The movers come to pack up tomorrow and then load up the van on Tuesday. It seems a little surreal to think that everything in the room I am in now will be placed in a box and gone. As it is my mom is crying at the drop of a hat...I can only hope that I don't join her.

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