Rules for home furnishingFollow

I have very recently been reminded of something, and figured some of you slackers might not yet be aware of this.

I am going to share with you all the ultimate home furnishing rule:

If you are not living in the house you plan on dying in, do not, ever, under any circumstances, no matter how cool it looks, or how nice, or anything else, ever, ever, ever buy heavy freaking furniture.

I don't care what all those home furnishing people tell you. I don't care whether you're one of those people who thinks that solid wood is soooo much better the vener over fiberboard (or something else cheap). I don't care. Oh. And I'm perfectly happy to sleep on a futon when I need to crash at your house. You don't really need to buy that hideabed couch thing. Really! You don't...


Hopefully, in a couple days, when my ankle swelling goes down and my back doesn't feel like it's on fire, I'll be able to look back on this last weekend and smile... Thank god I got to just sit down and drink beer Sunday. :)


Just think of this as a public service anouncement (yeah. I'm looking out for all of you. Really!). You really want to keep your friends right? Follow my home furnishing rule, and you'll likely keep them longer...

You may want to consider these additional rules:

Pink carpet will never be in style. Never.

Wallpaper is only acceptable if you have a perm, blue hair and incontinency.

Brass rhymes with ***. Think about it.

For the love of god, a flag is not a curtain.

Thank god, I'm movin' to the 'burbs, where the water flows like wine and money grows on trees. Gack! Kill me now!

Gbaji, as a PSA let me steer you towards Skeeter's favorite website:

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/christopherlowell/christopherlowell.html

Any questions you have concerning drapes, throwing a bridal shower, and removing that nasty stain Skeeter's boytoy Angry Hippo left on the sofa last night are addressed right there.

Totem

I'm looking at moving again this weekend, and I can't believe the crap my wife and I accumulated at our current residence. Frightening.

Our heaviest item is our couch. This thing does not have a hide-a-bed, but I think it is just solid particleboard. Just hauling it from store to van (mere feet away) both my wife and I were pouring sweat. And instead of coming to our senses, returning the thing, paying for delivery, etc, we still drove the blasted thing home. Then we dent the security screen door trying to squeze it through an opening just barely too small. Store it in the garage for a few days while we await help - plan is to haul the thing around the side of the house and bring it in the back. /shudder

Just as help is driving up the freeway to come visit us, mother in law calls up and says she thinks we should be able to break the thing into the three seats separately. We toss the beast on it's back and lo and behold! it separates into the three chairs - each of which is so light and non-bulky compared to the beast itself that we actually are laughing as we haul them inside. Score one for mother in law.

Moral: heavy is OK if it can easily be broken into pieces, and said process is reversible.

Ack. I have horrible memories of very nearly being squished when moving a fridge. Somehow the dolly got a bit too horizontal on me and I was left with the option of pushing it back to a balance position or being crushed. I actually felt a twinge and a pop in my back doing that one. Better then being crushed though...

Heh. Books are fun too. My cousin's girlfriend (wife now) packed up their stuff for a move once. I don't think she really understood how heavy books are. She took a *really* large box (like what you'd buy a TV in, and not a small one), and just packed it full of books. We had to completely repack that one. It was actually completely impossible to lift.

I used to actually like helping people move. For the last several years though, I've tried hard to avoid it whenever possible. It's not the work that bothers me. I just get annoyed when folks don't think about the inevitability of moving when they buy all that junk they put in their homes (hence the rant in this thread). When we were all poor college aged people, it wasn't a big deal. Now that all my friends are mostly successful, they for some reason think that means that they need to go out and buy the most expensive and heavy stuff they can find to fill their homes with even though they are still renting somewhere. Madness I say!

I used to have a full sized arcade game on the 3rd floor apartment. It wasn't so bad, as the stairs didn't wind at all, so we just laid it on it's side and slid it down the stairs.

Of course, I left it in the garage of one of the women I dated at the time, and it is long gone now. I loved that game, too. =/

What a bunch of amatuers. Having moved 33 times in 41 years, let me tell you the First Rule of Moving.


Get a hand truck. Buy one. They're cheap. Less than $40 dollars at Home Depot. They're worth their weight in gold. With a hand truck one man can move furniture up and down stairs that would crush the will of two or three strong men without a hand truck.

Get a hand truck.

If you trust me on nothing else, trust me on this.

Hehe, my best friend had two cockatiels when we were younger, and his dad built a HUGE friggin flight cage for 'em. The idea was to get them to breed.

Well, the flight cage was about 10' tall and maybe 6' wide.

Solid wood.

Up two flights of stairs.

Both with turns in 'em.

Man, I have never hurt so bad, and of course since I am commonly reffered to as "strong boy" around the house, it was just me and my friend to carry this behemoth up all those stairs. Ugh...