Move-In Day!

Drumroll... The long-anticipated day has arrived: I have finally moved into the Farmhouse! I booked the largest U-Haul available. Everyone except my always astute brother thought I could never fill this thing. Turns out, we still had to load some stuff into cars and half my belongings are still being stored at my mother's house until construction is complete at the Farmhouse and I have place to store everything in my new home...
















The above photos are the last moments of the Great Mattress Hoist. While I was hunting through the shed in back with my neighbour Lisa for a second tall ladder, the rest of my volunteer moving crew decided to see if it would even be possible to lift the mattress and boxspring over the balcony. (The reason being, of course, that the queen size mattress set was too large to go up the 1930s stairwell...) For some reason, they made this attempt with the mattress instead of the much smaller and lighter boxspring. Halfway through the exercise, they figured - "Hey, we've come this far, we may as well keep on going!" I missed the entire event, but here's how it was related to me:

Mikie, Lisa (my brother's fiancee, not my neighbour), and Robin were on the ground, holding up the mattress and using the one ladder to raise it up. Reid was on the roof, with my mother hovering anxiously inside the upstairs verandah door. All of a sudden, Robin saw or sensed something everyone else missed, and he bolted inside, up the stairs, down the upstairs hallway, over the human-sized hole in the upper verandah, and onto the roof to help Reid hoist the mattress over the lip of the verandah. Meanwhile, the girls on the ground were left trying to keep the mattress up, and my mother was yelling at Reid and Robin to drop the damn mattress before they fell through the hole in the verandah and broke their necks. (Good thing they ignored her. Not only would my new mattress have gotten filthy, Mikie and Lisa would have been, uhm, flattened...)

At this point, Lisa-my-neighbour and I came around the corner with a second ladder. We put it to use hoisting the boxspring up. Uneventfully, I might add. See how relaxed people seem in the photos? Apparently, that was not how they looked just before I arrived on the scene...

So, my happy ending is that I now sleep on a princess-and-the-pea-sized bed, thanks entirely to the efforts of my family and friends. How fortunate am I? (I already know the answer to that question.)