Things are moving

Things are moving, again. We rented a big Ryder truck to move the larger pieces Andy has collected this past summer up to the castle. They were making their home in my driveway, but with winter coming, we might need to get a plow in here and I am sure he wouldn't want to be manuevering between Andy's chess pieces.

New Steel beams from Alan Patrick's shop. Those were first to be loaded in.

The old church window. Been here since spring. Andy worked on this last weekend. He raised it up onto some blocks so we could get the pallet jack under it and he has it tied to the old basketball pole that was left from the previous owners, knew that would come in handy some day. Uncle Mark and our friend Andrew came to help move it into the truck. We were actually able to balance it on the pallet jack with each of us holding an end and manuever it over to the truck.

Here we are manuevering it, at an angle, to get on the lift gate.

Somehow we got it in after about an hour, or two, and we secured it to the side of the truck.

Next the boys got on the 4 pallets of stone you can see behind the chalice here. I was raking at this point and didn't take a picture of that, pallets of stone just don't seem exciting when you have large church windows and over sized chalices.

So, the chalice was easily moved from it's current place over to the lift gate and that's when it became challenging. We had to build it up with blocks at the base and pump it up and build it up and pump it up, you get the idea. then we took base and pump away and hoped for the best. what you see here is the best we could hope for, it stayed on the truck, balanced ever so gently, and never fell off. From here we were able to pull and push it in.

Andrew is in the truck pulling and Andy is pushing, while always having an escape route in mind in case it came back on him.

Rex got home from the Boyscout food drive just in time to see the final heave - ho into the truck.
Then the boys were off, Andy, Rex, and Andrew, for a Ryder trip to Tupper to unload it all. Andy's thoughts were it was going to be easy to unload and the three of them could handle it.

Here's a few cute pics of the younger boys on a break. They worked hard!

Here Andy and Rex are playing tug of war with the big window. OK, they are lowering it gently to the ground with a guide rope, but tug of war sounds like so much more fun.

and the word is they slide the chalice off the back of the truck and pulled the truck away slowly and the chalice stood. This is a picture of all the contents that were in my driveway here, now in my parking area there. The boys were working so hard, those are the only pictures we have.

We are all back up this weekend, a long Veterans Day one, so stay tuned.