Building/moving to a new home – day 85

The movers come in eleven hours

No blogging yesterday. I was packing from 7:00 am to midnight with occasional breaks for errands and a trip to our tax consultant. All five Smart Vaults are packed solidly to the top and are sitting locked and ready for the truck to arrive in about eleven hours with the big forklift.

I just locked the last vault a few minutes ago and am sitting here with every nerve vibrating from the long hours of strenuous effort in the intense cold. It was such a great feeling to meet the deadline I had set for myself that I decided to celebrate by blogging for a while.

I finished packing the three vaults which still had unused space in them. Since I was doing it all by myself, I had a chance to learn how to stack and protect things as I loaded the vaults. I had ordered 75 moving blankets and this gave me an average of fifteen blankets per vault. I had so many blankets that I was able to tape blankets around framed pictures to protect them instead of packing them in individual boxes. I stood them on edge and surrounded them with 6 inch slabs of foam I was recycling.

I noticed that my helpers has gotten careless when they were packing vaults yesterday. The furniture was packed in solidly, but there were too many instances of finished wood surfaces touching other finished wood surfaces. I moved things around and added more blankets until I felt that the furniture would survive the trip without damage.

Packing a storage vault is not rocket science. It does take care and an understanding of the kinds of forces that the furniture will be subject to. Objects must be secured so that they cannot move in any direction. Open space in a storage vault is an invitation for shipping damage. Every available space has to be filled with a box or a cushion of some kind. Rigid structures like tables need to be separated from other rigid objects by a cushion equivalent to several thicknesses of moving blanket.

A vault offers more protection against damage than a large van because you have rigid surfaces that are no more than 7 feet apart. The larger the enclosure, the more chance there is for the contents to shift when the vehicle brakes or accellerates.

Incidently, as I noted in my last post, not everything will fit into the five vaults. After I’ve had a few hours sleep, I will pick up all of the debris that is left, box it carefully and run it over to the new storage unit I rented a few days ago.

The house feels like an empty shell. Meals are getting to be very simple. We are living out of suitcases as we go through the last stages of shutting the place down. Gretchen calls the utilities and makes the necessary arrangements to cancel service while I box up the last remnants of our life at Lake Monticello. Our neighbors have taken turns inviting us for dinner and we are very appreciative.

Once we sign the papers at the closing tomorrow, there is nothing more holding us here. The new owner will sign the papers next week and will move in on Monday. We will close out a chapter of our life here and open a new one, one hundred and seventy five miles away, just in time for Christmas.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this saga. Will David and Gretchen have power and water by Christmas? Or will they be living at a Bed & Breakfast or depending on the hospitality of friends?

We expect to spend Christmas in our newly completed workshop, but we may find that the final stages of house house construction go faster once we are on the site keeping an eye on things. On the other hand, we could be in for some severe winter weather which could slow things down.

The adventure continues, and it will be blogged…

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