My dad decided he wanted a smaller bedroom set with a smaller bed. Since we had a nearly identical set to his, but with a queen bed (vs. his king bed), why wouldn’t we exchange? This ignores the fact that we live in different states, the furniture is HEAVY, and we are all old. For some reason, this seemed like a good idea, so we rented a U-Haul truck, filled it up and exchanged sets with Dad. Since that wasn’t confusing enough, we decided that Wolfe and Taryn should get a U-Haul truck, meet us in Illinois, and exchange their queen bed for the one that we picked up from Trav’s brother Brock a while back. And that part all worked, for the most part. The problem came when we had to move a gigantic bedroom set up our very narrow flight of stairs, which also has a 180 degree turn. I mean, it had to work, right? There was already furniture up there. The people before us had furniture too. 

So, we added a king bed in the basement bedroom, which also came from Brock. When we got my dad’s set, we put that mattress on that set. See, to make things more confusing, Travis and I ordered a new mattress for ourselves, and we were handing our eight year old mattress down to another room in the house. Tayden’s room went through a whole transformation. We emptied it, mostly into the hallway and the catwalk to nowhere, which is a unique and confusing feature in our house. At the top of our stairs, you can turn right to go to the bedrooms, or left to a catwalk that ends in a wall. It’s confusing. Tayden’s room got painted, but the day the new carpet installers came, they wouldn’t install the carpet because there was floor rot by the sliding glass door. Yes, for some reason, Tayden has a private balcony off his room. It was originally supposed to be an in-law suite or something, so there are also no hall lights. We knew the old door was leaking. That was why we replaced the slider. We are pretty smart people most of the time, so I’m not sure why we didn’t think to check under the carpet. We had to reschedule the install, which bumped everything back. That may not seem like a big set-back, but we have 20 or so people coming to our house for Memorial Day (not all are staying the night or the whole time), so we need the hallway to actually be a hallway and not a fire hazard, filled with Tayden’s junk. 

So, last Friday, after Travis did a stellar job of replacing the flooring, we got the carpet. Time to get Dad’s bedroom furniture from the garage to the bedroom. Travis was on call, so it happened in fits and starts. Oh, and Tayden had been sleeping in the basement and really REALLY liked my Dad’s old mattress much better than Trav any my old mattress. Our new mattress was also delivered Friday. So, we brought our 12 inch thick mattress downstairs (no real problem there) and tried to bring Dad’s 15 or so inch mattress upstairs. We decided to create a series of heists to haul this mattress up to the balcony. I promised to take pictures, but did NOT! We had that thing rigged with ropes, but could not clear the balcony railing, since the balcony was too narrow to make the tip. So, with Tayden running between the upstairs team (Travis and Tessa), and me on the downstairs team, the mattress made a controlled crash back to the second floor. Then, we had to stuff the mattress up the stairs. We should have bought a foam, bendable mattress! We had that mattress curved into a C to crunch it under the ceiling. After the second floor ceiling, the roof goes up into a vault, but we still had to clear the low ceiling. And still, NO PICtURES! Trav and I were pushing, Tessa and Tayden were pulling on the bottom to try to make it slide. That whole mattress was bent and crunched. Amazingly, it’s still really comfortable, but now has a few tears. By the way, those handles on the sides of mattress are just for show. They rip right off, along with more fabric, if you actually use them to move the mattress. 

After the mattress fiasco, we were spent. But we still had to move furniture. Since Travis went to work, Tessa, Tayden, and I thought we could move things without him. We were adding a giant desk to the set (why not?), so we used big green (our abused John Deere mower) to bring it around to the front door from the basement. Those moving straps are amazing, by the way! Then, Travis called, found out what we were doing, and told us to stop. When he got home from work around 1am, he roused all of us and told us we were moving the rest of the furniture. So, we did. People, do NOT hire us to move your stuff. We flipped the dressers every which way, sliding them along their tops when necessary, to get them up the stairs. I have one picture of this insanity. By 3am, we were done. We were also very AWAKE! So, there we were, at the kitchen table, playing Rummikub at three in the morning. 

Have a great week everyone! When we sell this place, the furniture will come with the house.