Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

I’m doing one of those sliding number puzzles; you know, the ones that have fifteen tiles in a matrix that can hold sixteen, and you have to slide them around until they’re in order. Except that the matrix is the lower level of my house, and the sliding tiles are things like 7′ tall Hundevad bookshelves, credenzas, a 61″ TV set and associated tableage, a treadmill, a queen-sized bed, Carol’s desk and chair, two vertical filing cabinets, a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, eight or nine hundred books in boxes, and enough boxed back issues of QSTs to make me cease wondering where the missing mass in the universe is hiding. And that’s the abbreviated list.

The goal of the puzzle is to get everything now resting on carpet onto areas where there is no carpet. The problem is, three quarters of the lower level is either carpeted or already committed to Big Heavy Things That Don’t Move, like my workbenches and shelves piled nine feet high with stuff that has nowhere else to go. On Tuesday morning bright and early, a crew of much younger guys with strong backs are going to show up here and want to know where to put everything. That means I have to tell them. And that in turn means solving the puzzle.

I leveraged a good deal of work I did nine years ago, when we were gearing up to move everything from Scottsdale to Colorado Springs. I drew nearly all of the big furniture we owned at that time in Visio (or adapted furniture shapes already in the product’s stencil sets) and then drew a floor plan of the house to which we were moving. I dragged the furniture shapes around in Visio until they fit, and when the truck pulled up in front of our rental house, we gave the mover guys a printed copy of the floor plan as I drew it. A year later we did the whole thing again, this time for the new house we had spent a year building. I had to re-draw the floor plan, but the furniture hadn’t changed and the shapes were still useful. Tugging them around the plan allowed us to get the furniture where it had to go the first time, without much need later on to wrestle large massive objects onto dollies and shove them into new arrangements with my fiftysomething back.

That worked well and was actually a lot of fun. It was easy, furthermore, because we had a whole house to play with. This time I have the furnace room (where much of that Big Heavy Stuff That Doesn’t Move actually lives) a single unfinished and uncarpeted bedroom, and portions of my workshop. As it happens, I can get it all in there, but the furniture must be placed in a very specific order and with considerable precision. The treadmill will clear the furnace room door with about 1/2″ on either side. (It won’t clear the other doors at all.) It’s going to be intense, my friends.

The carpeting was damaged by condensate spilling out of our air conditioner this past summer, so we’re ripping it up and replacing it with something a little more robust and a little less pink. Since the carpeting will be gone, we figure it’s as good a time to paint as any, particularly the lower level great room, which looks like it was painted with melted strawberry ice cream. If you wonder we we don’t entertain guests down there, that’s certainly one of the reasons.

So our most intense week in well over ten years continues apace. Carpet samples litter the great room. Vinyl flooring samples for the rear entranceway lie about next to the woodwork while we search for harmony. About six shelf-feet of component data books still need to be boxed, as well as most of the contents of Carol’s office.

I’ll report our progress here as time allows. Christmas cards will be a little late this year, sorry.

I am sore. Since we got back from Chicago a few days ago, we’ve been picking up the lower level of our house in preparation for some messiness: We have to have the east end of the slab mudjacked to raise it a little and keeping it from sinking any further. The damage isn’t huge so far, thanks to a little-known method of framing lower levels of homes like ours, which basically suspends the walls from the main level. The lower-level slab can thus move independently (mostly) of the walls.

The mudjacking contractor originally told us that they would only need to pull back the carpeting on the east and south facing rooms a few feet. Further analysis (which we learned only yesterday afternoon) showed that those east and south facing rooms will have to be emptied completely. My workshop is mostly unaffected, but the eastmost section of slab has sunk a little, and I have to move whatever sits on that section, to the first seam.

Alas, what sits on that section are two 150-pound particle-board shelves containing sixty years of QST (with a density only slightly less than National Geographic) plus 35 years of CQ, the full run of Ham Radio, a spotty collection of 73, plus fifteen ARRL handbooks, four shelf-feet of component databooks, and several dozen other miscellanous tech books. Oh, and the tops of the shelves are piled high with homebrew projects.

And that’s just my workshop. In the great room are another eight or nine hundred books on six robust Hundavad shelves, a treadmill, a couch, a 1937 Zenith cathedral radio, and two oak tables supporting a 61-inch TV and associated electronics. In the guest bedroom are two more tall bookshelves (fortunately not densely populated) a bed, a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, and two waist-high teak cabinets. In Carol’s office are another two-drawer lateral file cabinet, her desk, a rocking chair, a tall bookshelf, and miscellanous furniture.

Readers who have been here may begin to get a grip on the magnitude of the challenge. All that stuff has to be moved onto firmer slab, which exists in only three places: the furnace room, the unfinished bedroom, and the western two-thirds of my workshop. All three of these places have stuff scattered about in them. So we have to empty those places out so that we can fill them with furniture and boxes from the rest of the lower level.

Oh…we have seven days to do this, and counting. From a dead stop.

So last night I was downstairs stuffing books in boxes, schlepping stuff to the garage, and piling it on the higher sections of steel shelving that we already have. (I’m going to buy another Gorilla Rack when I go out later to buy more boxes.) One of the lateral file cabinets is broken and will be scrapped, but Carol has to empty it first. ARC is going to get several goody-bags of resale material, which means that more time will be spent culling the collection.

It’s almost like moving, except we’re not going anywhere.

So I’m sore from hoisting boxes of medical books and photo albums onto a cart and then onto shelves. The QSTs haven’t been touched yet. I had hoped to write a longish Contra entry yesterday evening, but by 8:30 PM I was too wrecked to do anything but sit in my big chair and take notes on the coming days’ logistical challenges. I think I can do this. It may well be excellent strength training. (Moving here from Arizona in 2003 certainly was.) But man, it’s gonna hurt.