Piano Moved

We got the piano moved with very little drama!

Here's the removal process:

And here it is, moved into our house! It happened so fast I didn't have a chance to take a picture of the piano in motion.

The piano movers did misspell our street address, and made it "almost to I-70" before they figured it out. We saw them on the freeway on our way home, so we were wondering what made them arrive at our house an hour after we did.

The Piano looks great! We'll give it a week to get acclimated to the new house, and then bring in a tuner at some point.

Now we just have to figure out who's going to play the blasted thing.

Piano Moving

Brianna inherited a piano a while back, and her parents have been gracious enough to hang on to it while we have been moving between cities and states for the last several years.

It's currently living on the second floor of the "carriage house" at Brianna's parents' property (something of a mother-in-law apartment above the detached garage - but very nicely finished). There is a window of opportunity this weekend during which it will be possible to access the piano and move it out of the carriage house. So, we are hiring piano movers this Saturday to get the piano from a second storey location in Colorado Springs to our family room in Denver.

We don't have an exact quote yet, but it's going to be at least several hundred dollars. That (and the mattress topper) have a significant impact on our monthly budget - I don't think we can afford to have professional painters come out this month any more.

The painters we were hoping to work with aren't returning my calls this week, so maybe this financial situation is actually a blessing in disguise.

Moving Furniture Part II

I had intended to start prepping the upstairs hallway for painting this evening, maybe going so far as to actually paint the trim. However, I wound up staying at work past 6 PM in order to help get a project out the door before tomorrow morning. Traffic was really good on the way home, though!

The temperature got up to 90F today, and when I arrived at home, Brianna informed me it was time to set up a living space in the cool, pleasant basement. So while Brianna made dinner I moved the TV and its computer downstairs to the basement, and then set everything up again.

We sit much farther away from the TV with this set up - makes it a more difficult to use the TV for things other than watching TV.

After dinner, Brianna and I hashed out a written budget for the first time since we bought the house. Assuming we can maintain our discipline, there will be a lot fewer new items appearing around the house during the month of June...

Moving Furniture

Now that the kitchen and family room are just about ready to contain furniture again, it's time to start thinking about getting the great room prepped for painting. We have been keeping most of our things in the great room while the other areas get painted, so it is quite a mess. I have slowly started organizing things over the last several days.

Now that the days are fairly warm on a routine basis (often above 80F) the house is pretty warm when we come home, and the cool basement makes for a comfortable retreat. We're planning to move the television down there, and probably some other furniture as well. I cleared out some space for that to happen:

Prepping for Painting the Main Floor

Brianna is going on two business trips over the next two weeks, making it a good time for me to tackle painting the main floor areas without fumigating Brianna out of the house with paint fumes. I'm hoping to get the ceiling and walls in this picture primed this week, and painted the following week. We'll see if I can keep my motivation up.

We prepped by moving most of the furniture out of the room. But the china cabinet we inherited from the sellers is really heavy. I'm going to just move that a couple feet off the wall and drape it in plastic.

As part of moving furniture around, we finally moved the white couch down to the basement.

It was a tight fit:

Just a couple inches too long in this orientation.

but we (eventually) made it:

Last "Half Car-load"

I'm consistently bad at estimating the last load out of an apartment.

Still, after three and a half hours of work, the apartment is empty of everything except a bucket of cleaning supplies and the vacuum cleaner. The bathrooms and living spaces are clean. The windows and some of the kitchen still need to be cleaned.

Day After Moving

Ok, I just dropped off the U-Haul, and I'm sitting in a coffee shop til Brianna can pick me up.

We woke up this morning in our own house!

!!!


While packing up took awhile, and we're technically not done with the apartment yet, things still went pretty smoothly. Brianna's FitBit says she took 17,000 steps yesterday, and I did most of the carrying of heavy things out to the U-Haul, so I had a pretty good day of exercise yesterday as well. My legs are tired.

Unloading went extremely smoothly, despite already being quite tired by the time we got to the house. The house is so much bigger than the apartment that we didn't have any problem finding places to put things. The furniture is all in the front room, some boxes and stools are in the garage, most of the clothes boxes are in the bedrooms, and the kitchen has several boxes stacked around it.

Those Push Pull Rotate doorknobs were AWESOME for moving. Even if the door slammed shut in the wind while we were carrying a couch halfway between the truck and the door, I could just bump the doorknob with my hip and we were in! We've only had them a couple days, so I can't speak to their longevity, but right now I wholeheartedly recommend these knobs to everyone. I think we may be using them for the rest of the house as well.

The U-Haul

For an extra $10, we upgraded from a 12-foot-long to a 17-foot-long truck. Pretty glad we did. We were also able to fit a couch from Hans in here along the way to the house.

It took 6 hours to load, nearly an hour to drive, and just over an hour to unload. 

Moved

Holy [expletive deleted] you guys. The U-Haul is completely unloaded, and we're on the way to pick up my car now. We'll return the U-Haul in the morning, and we have cleaning to do at the apartment, as well as half a car-load of miscellania.

But all that can wait til tomorrow. I'm exhausted.

Moving

Yeah, it's totally snowing right now.