In and out of business in 4 days!

About a week ago we went into the moving business to help my sister move to her new home in Delaware. She had some household items stored in our barn, the bulk of her things in storage in Memphis (from where she moved), and a few new items to pick up in North Carolina. Four days later we unloaded the truck, retired from the moving business and came home on Amtrak.


Here Sandy and Judy hold back everything we had stuffed into storage last fall when she sold her home. Note there is only about one inch of space left at the front of the storage area. We had had to hold the box spring back and quickly shut the door when we had it all in.




This is the truck we stuffed it all into, a 26-ft rental from Penske.











And here's the route we took, more or less, nearly 1500 miles. You may need to click on the "minus" box on the map to see the whole route.

Now, back to our regular programming.

The Clampets return to the hills

Saturday was the big day. With help from Brian and Ed III, and a borrowed truck, we got all the big things moved from the rented apartment to the new apartment on the property.

There are still plenty of things to finish, but we are now living at Greene View Springs. The trash in the picture will be going away soon, and with warm weather's return, we will finish the panels at the top of the east and, pictured, west wall.

Tomorrow satellite TV is being installed, and sometime this week if it doesn't get too wet again our driveway and multiple parking places will be built/regraded.

Stay tuned, there has been tons of progress, just not enough time to take and post pictures.

A telephone land line should be installed this week and I'll have effective access to the internet to post more pictures. Right now I'm only able to use the laptop and steal service from a neighbor who has wi-fi, but it is spotty at best. This post so far has taken 40 minutes to enter, again and again until it finally worked.

Let's not do that again

We got home just after 10PM from unloading a rented trailer in the dark.

In fact, we unloaded the trailer 5 times this weekend. I don't know if I can survive another holiday like this one.

The place we rent the trailer isn't open on Sundays so with a Saturday rental one gets two days for a one-day rental. On a three-day weekend we get one day more.

Saturday we moved the cabinets from the ReStore in Bloomington to the barn early and then got one more load of heavy things from the old place in Indianapolis and filled the rest of the trailer with lighter items from my daughter-in-law's garage.

Sunday I emptied the garage in Indy and we got it unloaded at the barn just as it got dark enough for the lights to come on.

Today we moved almost everything from the old site at Raccoon Creek. I took apart the tent platform I built last fall while we were making barn beams. The 4X8 panels were saved but the pallet bases were too far gone and will make good firewood some day.

We moved about 80% of the patio bricks we had moved there more than a year ago. Also retrieved were all the clay and most of the plastic flower pots, more steel shelves, the picnic table, a metal glider with side table, some concrete blocks, three garden benches, a stock trough and other miscellaneous outdoor items.

We had the very old (100 years or so) porcelain sink on the trailer that was removed from the Indy house years ago, but it is very heavy and just one item too many to get the trailer on the road. (Some day the old sink will be hooked up near the garden work area.) The trailer's tires were so flat we just took the sink off on the north side of the bridge to be picked up another day. We had to use two large 2X12 boards to get the car and trailer over the hump at the bridge abutment.

The left tire still looked so flat that we stopped within a few miles to check the load. The trailer's left fender was warm indicating that the tire had been rubbing it. We moved some of the paving bricks to the car and many more from the left to the right side of the trailer. The rest of the trip was uneventful, but with the delays at the bridge and in reorganizing the load it was dark all the way back to Greene View Springs.

And that's why we were unloading the trailer in the dark.

I set up a few lights to see the path to the brick pile, but when the lights were turned off it was very dark again and the stars were beautiful. The Milky Way was very visible almost directly overhead. Watching the night sky will be a favorite pastime when our home is built a bit farther down the hillside and even more removed from other light sources. Long ago we decided we would not use outside lights at night except when they were truly needed, and a beautiful night sky like tonight just reinforces that decision.

Emptying the storgage unit

Today we had a "free" day with the rental trailer so we moved the whole 10 X 20 storage unit in three round trips between the barn and the unit. That took all day. It's about 40 miles each way, so getting three trailers-full loaded and unloaded and making the trips without a speeding ticket was quite a feat. It was dark when we finally left the barn.

Major move

Tonight, with my son's help, we moved a truckload of big stuff: refrigerator, washer and dryer, sofa and love seat, file cabinets, tables, shelving, bookcases and lots of boxes.

With the key to the barn, everything that won't be used in the apartment went straight there. Then we wrestled the sofa up the stairs to the apartment. By the time we got back to Indianapolis it was nearly midnight.

Too bad there's still a lot of things in the barn that need to be moved by the seller. We can't organize our stuff well and still leave a path for removing their stuff. Hopefully they'll have it all out of there soon.

Tomorrow we'll do one more truckload of things too big for a trailer.

We start moving into the apartment

Not a lot happened today. A friend joined us for a drive to Bloomfield and we took a carload and a trailer full of boxes to put in the apartment's second bedroom.

We found the Chinese buffet just two short blocks away. All you can eat for $5.19.

The apartment is within a few blocks of the post office, the bank, the county court house, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the local newspaper, and two places to eat.

It's about 75 miles from the old house to the apartment. We won't be making the drive without at least a car full of boxes.

Our "House Cooling" Party

We invited many of our friends to a "house cooling" party today. Since I never had a real house warming, I thought this would be a chance to celebrate the old place.

In a house warming, some people bring small gifts. In my house "cooling", we tried to get friends to take gifts, both small and large.

We asked them to bring boxes and something to share, and Sandy prepared a few dishes. We didn't need to clean up much since some rooms were empty and most had boxes in them ready to be moved.

Everyone had a good time. We ate off paper plates since the dishes are all packed. When they left we got back to work packing.

Living in someone else's house

We closed on the sale of the house in Indianapolis today. The date was moved forward from August 1st, and then back a day, but the deed is done, or, to be precise, the deed is in the new buyers' names.

We have a lot of work to do in Indy still. Most of the contents are still there, and we don't have anywhere to move it yet except the new apartment which is small to say the most. I also need to take down some of the large shelving in the greenhouse, dismantle the grandkids' tree fort and take the raised gardens apart to save the stiff sides for the new site.

The buyers have a lot they want to do before they start using the building so no absolute date has been set for us to completely vacate the building. We have set the end of next week as our goal, but I have agreed to pay the utilities through the end of the July.

Here's a picture of what we're moving from: