Outdoor work, some heavy lifting

Last week my wife went to Fred Meyer’s, a local superstore, and purchased a sofa. Unlike IKEA, Fred doesn’t deal in flat pack furniture but instead with fully assembled stuff, so we then had to figure out how to get it back home.
One of our helpful neighbours offered to let us use his car to fetch it. Now, Americans all drive massive cars, so I had some hope, but his regular SUV was no match for an eight foot long sofa. We retreated in defeat, but I knew I had to have the sofa this weekend.

Loews, the home improvement store, advertise on their website that they’ll rent you a truck. So I called them, and an angry woman screeched "we don’t rent trucks" and put the phone down on me.

Next I tried U Haul, who will rent you a truck. A couple of hours later I had a big Ford Cargo van, with drove like a bus, stank of petrol, and made different but equally ominous noises all the way to Fred Meyer’s. You accelerated, there was a strange clunking noise. You slowed down, there was the noise of something sloshing about. You drove at a uniform speed, unidentifiable banging and whirring occurred.

I avoided crashing into any part of any building, parked up in the subterrean garage, and a while later the man who brought our sofa out before, brought the same ridiculous enormous thing out again, and this time it fitted inside the truck.

And then he mentioned the love seat.

Somehow I’d assumed the enormous monstrosity of plastic, cardboard and wrapping paper before me included both sofas, but no, there was another piece to shift. With the man’s help and a lot of shoving we got it into the van, and then I drove off, having inadvertently stolen his name badge.

I got home, and there followed an hour of rudimentary geometry as we had to lift, flip and rotate the sofas to get them up our front stairs, into the house (how do you fit an 8′ sofa through a 7′ door?) and into our living room. After that, the challenge of fitting legs to the sofa was too much, and I admitted defeat.

Defeat is much more acceptable when you have a sofa to lie upon. And then I just had to drive the monstrous truck back again.