Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The Hardest Day

We have now passed what I consider to be the "half-way mark." I don't mean that in a chronological sense, or in the sense that half of the moving jobs are finished, but we just got "over the hump." Yesterday, we got the hardest jobs done of the move:
- We moved the pizza room equipment, including the dough mixers, the pizza oven, and the sheeter.
- We moved the last of the office equipment, including the safes.
- We moved the washer and dryer.
- We moved the stove and propane tanks.

The stove and propane tanks in particular will go down as the most challenging part of the entire relocation. I had Will Russell, Travis MacLellan, Scott Chamberlain, and Jeff Coull to help me, and even with the five of us, we barely made it happen. The two propane tanks weighed around 400 pounds each, by my estimate. That isn't that heavy - any two of us could lift that weight if it was properly distributed. However, the tanks were in a recessed shed in the patio, and had to be lifted straight up and out. It isn't easy lifting shiny tanks like that, with nothing to grip, in the snow. However, by removing part of the shed and attaching some chains, we eventually got them out, and rolled them over to the new restaurant.




When it came to the stove, there were certainly more places to grab, although the stove probably weighed about 500 pounds. However, the problem with the stove is that when we originally put it into the restaurant, we brought it through the front door. And after that, we built a wall between the stove and the front door. We thought we should be able to just go out the back door instead, but it wasn't nearly wide enough, so we ended up calling Peter and Ralph over for help (they were doing some minor carpentry for me in the new restaurant). They quickly removed the door frame entirely, and after all that was pulled out, we had a quarter inch to spare. We got the stove out with all seven of us working together, and brought it over and into the new restaurant. Luckily, the door going into the new place was bigger.

Who needs a boom truck when you have a couple of football players and a couple of rugby players?