Moving a refrigerator, Eastie style
By adamg - Mon, 08/18/2008 - 8:31am.
Fabulously Out There grabs her camera just in time to get some action shots of her crazy-ass neighbors lowering a refrigerator from their second-floor porch to the ground.
- Add new comment |
| 
| 
I love it, mainly because
I love it, mainly because Ive been there and done that.
When you grow up in a triple decker you find out how thin the hallways are and how impossible it can be to move things in and out without doing real damage to drywall. So the solution is head to the back of the apartment and go over the deck. Ive seen fridges, beds, dressers, and desks all lowered from a second/third story, and on a few occasions have seen the same objects (except the fridge) go up the same way.
These guys seemed to be missing a good canvas or plastic tarp to catch any drips or falling parts, and gloves. Im actually quite impressed tho because they seemed to hold that fridge at a steady pace at the end with two guys on the ropes.
Works in the suburbs, too!
I had a one-piece commercial air hockey table that weighed about 600 pounds. When I moved in, it took about six movers to get it up the stairs. When I moved out, I sold it on eBay.
Well, the buyer didn't have six movers. But he did have an artist friend who carves granite boulders for a living, and that friend has a crane truck. So we set a date for him to come by.
Only problem: we couldn't get the table out the window we'd planned to use; it was about two inches too small for the table to fit through. There was another window, around the corner, which his crane couldn't quite reach to.
But it could *almost* reach it. (Can you see where this is going?)
So, after about ten minutes of calculations, he declared that if we tipped the air hockey table out the window, he could position the crane such that the table would drop about six inches, right into the crane's basket.
The guy paid me the cash already, so why the heck not? We carried the table over to the window together, and balanced it on the sill. He went outside to maneuver the crane. At his signal, we pushed it forward, just enough to move the center of gravity outside. At which point, it continued tipping by itself.
And what do you know? The guy is good. It fell right into the crane harness. Physics works.
Which is good, because I have no idea who you call to haul away air hockey debris.
I would have loved to have
I would have loved to have seen that, it sounded like it was quite suspensful for a few moments there. When people build new houses they should take these things into account and make sure there are easier ways to get big stuff in and out of the house.
I remember my father telling me about his days living in Cambridge where they had to take a window out to get a piano out of their house (this was back in the day when you could afford a nice place in Cambridge on a working class salary, that people had large pianos, and you could sneak a small crane truck into your back yard without being reprimanded.)