How to cut your couch into pieces? (Part II)
In the first part of this post I described the situation where I was forced to cut my own couch into pieces to get if out of the apartment. This time it’s not about chopping something, it’s about transporting the couch. Everything started about week after series of events described in the first post took place. Friend of mine called me and we had approximately the following short conversation:
...
He: I’m moving this weekend. Can you help me with the couch?
I: Aight.
...
On Saturday morning we happily gathered at my friend’s place. There were four of us (before the move there were some rumors that the couch was big and therefore some additional human resource was needed). After arriving at the scene I discovered a couple of things:
- Apartment was located on the second floor so transporting anything would definitely include some unconventional movements on stairs.
- Couch was big. Actually it was big enough not to fit out of the door in any position as we eventually discovered.
- The color of the couch was white therefore making it dirty wasn’t an option either.
After cynically suggesting slicing the couch to avoid the work this wasn’t apparently considered as a viable option ;-) Main problem was still ahead of us - how to get this thing out of the apartment? The only solution was to get it out through the second floor balcony. I don’t even want to know how this couch was transported into the apartment in a first place. As I suspect it had to be moved in through the balcony also. Fine, the algorithm was simple: a) take the couch; b) get it out somehow; c) load it to the truck and do the opposite thing after arriving to our destination.
Because of the Murphy’s Law we started having some complications - it started raining outside and grass was slowly becoming muddier and muddier. As three of us are software engineers then we quickly came up with the 'perfect solution' - let’s wrap the couch into plastic. The roll of plastic appeared magically from somewhere and we started wrapping the couch. The wrapping process was nontrivial; we had two people holding some part of the couch constantly in the air and two people doing the wrapping. Finally we managed satisfactorily to wrap the couch and reached the next part - actually moving it.
Moving process itself was quite tricky - we had two ropes which we connected to the couch in some complicated ways ;-) Algorithm was quite simple: four of us helped to raise the couch and move it to the balcony and then two persons stabilized the couch while it was hanging in the air. At the same time other two persons quickly ran downstairs to bring couch to the ground. I had some amount of common sense to resist against being the person on ground, but unfortunately somebody had to do this ;-( So, here we were - the wobbling couch in the air, ropes securing it, and two of us trying to land it safely. Fortunately luck was on our side and nobody got hurt. After we landed one end of the couch then rest of the 'couch team' ran down and helped to stabilize and carry the couch into the truck.
Anyhow, if you live in Seattle area and have any plans to cut/move your couch, let me know and we can form the non-profit organization of couch geeks ;-) Why? Because we can ;-)
P. S. One of the things they never tell you while asking help for anything is that there’s always a catch with everything ;-) This time the catch was also helping to move some of the home gym exercise equipment. Let me tell you something - these machines are heavy! Initially we expected that it’ll be possible to carry them through the door (positive thinking). Unfortunately it proved to be impossible because of the way how the machines were designed. The good thing with the exercise equipment is that it’s possible to deconstruct the apparatus into the smaller pieces and then transport pieces through door. I would never feel secure standing under the couple of hundred pounds of wobbling steel...