Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Altoona, IA - 1st Move: Into Storage

And Jeff and Jesse rolled in at 10:40, right on time and not a minute too soon for us. They backed the truck up to our garage door, lowered the ramp and went to work loading the items we are putting into storage for he future. It was so much fun watching someone else do the work. But, being the Type A that I am, and not being used to watching work, I picked up a piece and carried it out to the truck. Silly me. I quickly stopped that.

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Slowly but surely the house emptied out and our voices began to echo. It looks so strange and cold without furniture. I always thought it looked so warm and inviting with the furniture we had in it.

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The only things left in our warm, inviting living room were those things we were leaving for Lloyd or Mary to sell in their sales.

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We’ve made many decisions about what to keep and what to sell but, in the back of my mind, my rule of thumb is: what will I regret selling? What will I look back on and kick myself for not keeping? And, when I look at this picture of these items that we have designated for sale, I know that I will regret selling the spice rack: the small wooden rack off to the right with the 8 white handles for 8 small drawers. I remember when my mother had those spice drawers filled with spices. I use to stand on a chair and open the drawers one by one, smelling the heavenly aroma emanating from each: the clove drawer, the cinnamon drawer, the sage drawer, the thyme drawer. Yep, I’d better save that from the sell pile and put it into storage. I grew up with that and I’d like to grow old with that.

They finished loading in jig time (only 1 hour) and we all were off for our storage spot. They unloaded in the same jig time and were in and out in 2 1/2 hours. Great work. Good careful workers, they didn’t stop a minute. We will see them again next week when they pick up the household items that we are sending to Lloyd’s for sale.

Then we sat in our storage bay and ate lunch - or ate a piece of cheese and a protein bar. Yep, a great meal in a great setting. Boy, do I know how to entertain. The hostess with the mostest, that’s me. But, it was nice to sit, knowing that a great deal was done and the end was near.

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We saw a truck on our way back to the house which had the sign: Sir Build-A-Lot on the side with the web address of sirbuildalot.com. Don’t click on that, it’s not important unless you want to have someone build a lot. I laughed at the name until Gary said: ‘well it’s better than:

        Sir I’ll Make It Up As I go.

        Sir I Don’t Have a Clue

I chimed in with:

        Sir I’ll Give It a Try

        Sir I’ll learn on Your Dime

And we’re both laughing. Given the quality of those jokes, you can see our brains are fried But we know we are very close to the end with this first move out of the way and the second scheduled.

Back at the house, we took the king bed frame and king Select Comfort mattress apart. It was a jig-saw puzzle with many interlocking parts. We took pictures as we went so that anyone who bought it might see how it goes together.
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And, of course, someone has to get the air out to the actual mattresses. It’s a dirty job but someone has to volunteer to do it and I was the one.
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We actually have ‘sold’ the bed (although nothing is sold until I have the money in my sweaty palms and the buyer is driving away) and are readying it for the pick-up tomorrow afternoon. We put an ad into Craig’s list for this bed since we thought we might be able to sell it better that way and make more money than having Lloyd sell it and take his percentage.

We really didn’t have any great expectations but I got a nibble several days ago - from a woman who told me that she and her husband have a Select Comfort Queen now and want a King since - get this - he broke his back and needs more space in bed. Holy cow. Well, this is the bed for them.

But, she seems a bit scatty (and we attribute this to her situation) so we have been leery about this sale. We know she wants and needs this bed but were concerned that she might not know what she was getting into. Especially today after we took it apart and saw how big it all was, how many pieces it has and how complicated it would be to put together. We were so concerned that we took these pictures to e-mail to her so she could see what she was getting into. Not that we wanted to discourage the sale but we did want to be upfront. Earlier in a phone conversation, she mentioned her son and his pick-up.

Pick-up? Well, the headboard is 7’ by 4’ and is way too big for a pick-up. She responded that she had gotten a rental trailer with pads and was ready with cash. OK, I feel much better now about her buying this.

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