All in all, this was a much easier job than the last moving job I did, last Saturday. A woman from church needed help moving her possessions out of storage into her new apartment, and I was one of the Deacons who pitched in. The "out of" was a lot easier than the "into," because while the storage locker and the truck were more or less on the same level, the apartment was on the second floor. Moving things from one place to another on the ground? No problem. From one place on the ground to another up a flight of stairs? Problem. Luckily, there were other people in better shape than I on hand to do most of the hard work, I still had to help wrestle the mattress and box spring and bookcase and the monstrously large sofa up the stairs. Yuck. Nevertheless, the job got done and we only broke one window doing it. (It was the sofa's fault.)
Come to think of it, a did a little bit of moving of stuff on Monday, too. An older couple from my church have been accepted into a local continuing care retirement community, and in additional to having to move, they have to prepare their house to be sold. A large part of that latter task is sorting through and disposing of the stuff they've accumulated over the 40+ years they've lived in the house, and brother they've accumulated a lot. A lot a lot. I'm not particularly involved with that project, but one of the project leaders recruited me to help with a small part of it: clearing stuff from around the electrical panel in the basement. Not a big job, but their basement is so full that it took a bit of doing to find a place to move it to.
I say I'm not particularly involved in the project, but I have found myself thinking about one particular aspect of it since visiting the house. Among the stuff in the basement is an enormous model train layout constructed by the husband. It's way too big to be moved to their apartment in the retirement community, and it's not the kind of thing that would convey with the property, so I suppose it will have to go, and its sheer size means it'll have to go in pieces. I'm not a model train guy myself, but I do know what it's like to be really super-enthusiastic about something, and that fannish side of me thinks it would be a shame to destroy a creative labor of love. So I'm going to do a bit of research on what can be done, if anything, to preserve it. There are a couple of hobby shops near me, and I know there's a big model train expo at the Alliant Center each year, so I should be able to find someone who can talk knowledgeably about what what to do.
