choco_frosh | Realm: Moving - Subrealm: I gots a Frezr

Yesterday night I got mud all over someone's front hall, probably ruined the pile on their carpet, scratched up their front door, took one of their major appliances away, and probably bent their tools. And they thanked me for it.

The appliance? A six-foot, 200-pound freezer. The location? Meriden. The means? Freecycle.

Yup, these people were moving out of their apartment; we were moving into one. They needed to get rid of a freezer; we wanted one. That was the easy part. The hard part was transferring it from one place to another. More specifically, in and out of the van we were borrowing from Grace's parents.

The woman who was getting rid of said freezer (along with her eccentric mother and bratty sister) were kind enough to help us move the freezer to the door. This involved a cmbinationg of swivelling it on the corners, dragging it over the rug, and attempting to use cardboard to ease it over those one-inch lips in the floor that you never notice until you're, say MOVING A FREEZER OVER THEM. (We ended up having to use brute force here.) All while the freezer leaked condensation from the defrosting process and deposited the gunk that had been on the bottom all over the carpet. "Don't worry about it," the owner repeatedly assured us. "It's ownership association's problem now!"

This worked fine until we got to the door.
At which point it became rather evident that, while we might be able to get the freezer through (standing it upright and then tipping it down), there was no way to do this without ripping off its door handle. Trust me, we tried.

"Well, it must have got in SOMEHOW," said the owner, attempting to dissuade her two year-old from coming to investigate this interesting activity (and risking getting squashed). "Maybe if we took the front door off? It's only twelve screws..."

Having verified that we did not, in fact, have an electric screwdriver, the rest of us were less excited by this prospect, preferring to consider the possibility of removing the freezer's handle. It, unfortunately, did NOT have any visible screws.
So we were all scratching our heads, when her Mom (who rocked), suggested, "Couldn't you take the freezer door off?"

Some fifteen minutes (and several unsuccessful strategies) later, I was on the floor, propping a large hammer upright with one foot so that it could act as a fulcrum for the small adjustable wrench I was banging on with a second hammer. The wrench, in turn, was being used as a lever on the lower of the two hinge pinx on the freezer. The owner was looking on in fascination. "I've never seen anyone take a door off its hinges before," she remarked.
"Really? I did it for fun, with a couple of wooden blocks, when I was ten..."

The hinges on my brother's door, of course, had been considerably less intractable than this one. Even the upper hinge on the freezer had been comparatively straightforward. This one, though, was rusted (or something), and so the hinge pin's resistance was considerably greater than, for example, that of the hinge's attachment to the side of the fridge. Hence the Rube Goldberg arrangement, which actually worked.

Some time after that, after repeatedly re-positioning the van and somehow shoving the freezer into it (followed by its door and shelves), we got on our way. "The van...feels a lot heavier in the back," observed Grace.
We slowed down for a light, and heard the freezer rapidly slide along the back, to come to a rest with a slight thump against our seats. "Right. Let's not do any more rapid stops..."

Back at the new apartment, we recruited Stephen who gets extra servings of sainthood, to help us extract it from the van. After the "Let's see if the bar with no name will lend us a dolly!" strategy had failed, and we'd confirmed that we didn't have a giant webbing strap, a football team or an anti-gravity device, our eventual plan involved Stephen somehow lifting the bottom end and the two of us carrying schlepping it hurriedly to the basement stairs, after which we slid it down using cardboard from the construction project next door. It was in. We cuold go home and sleep.