Oh my god that was so much work. But we've moved!
We hired a senior relocation company to help with the move. I was sold when the owner who was visiting the old house to see what the job entailed mentioned selling off someone's collection of 300 tractors. If they can deal with that, they could deal with our much smaller pile of junk.
We had them pack the house, hire the movers, auction off the stuff we didn't move, and get rid of the rest. They did a great job packing. I packed the garage, which took most of a week of working flat out. I built a couple reinforced pallets to hold the mill drill, mini lathe and drill press. It turns out that you can cram a lot of stuff into a three car garage if you have 28 years to do it and don't care about parking more than one car in it.
I moved the bicycles, fluids, chainsaws and other gas tools, plus the tractor and attachments. Also the metal stock stacked up in the back there, and a lot of Laura's garden stuff. The amount I moved worked out so the truck bed was full every time I hauled a trailer load up, except on the last trip where I was looking for more stuff to throw in there.
The movers were supposed to have a pallet jack but they weren't told to bring it. They managed to man handle the mill onto the lift gate using a furniture dolly but it was super sketchy.
We went up first with me driving the GX and Laura in her Golf Alltrack with the cat. The cat was not happy about this at all. We camped out in the garage apartment the night before the movers arrived and the cat was even less happy about that. She went nearly catatonic for a day which had us worried. But once we moved in the house and there was familiar furniture she came out of it to just unhappy. After a few days she's fine, if stressed from various strangers being in the house.
The movers brought a pallet jack to unload, but of course the pallet slots in my pallet did not match up. So more sketchiness was involved getting it in the shop.
Laura and I drove back down in the Alltrack so I could bring the truck and trailer up. First trailer load was my Golf R, with some more bikes stuffed into it.
Being new to trailering vehicles I had some problems with the straps coming loose, but nothing fell off or got damaged. I stopped and checked a lot. The scariest part of the entire drive was the road down the mountain from the old house. It's super steep, twisty and narrow, with a fair amount of traffic. Each time I tried to time it to avoid traffic. Everyone drives down at the same time to take their kids to school and then many of them drive back up, so I tried to go before or between those times.
Besides the first moving trip, there were four more round trips with the trailer in the space of about two weeks. Each trip was about 8 hours one way, so pretty much an entire day. I got kind of tired after a while as you can see from my sloppy photography.
This is the Honda UTV and log splitter.
The Branson with backhoe and loaded tires weighs a couple hundred pounds more than the trailer's listed capacity. I took it easy and the truck and trailer handled it fine. The chains and binders had the tractor solidly tied to the frame. There's one section of the route in the bay area where the pavement is terribly broken up and heaved from over use and under maintenance. I was worried about the tractor on that section until I realized that I was traveling on a Sunday and I could take the much better condition middle lanes without making a lot of commuters mad.
The truck is a 2022 Silverado 2500 diesel. It's engine braking and aggressive down shifting for descents handled the mountain sections of the route very well. Even going down Siskiyou pass where semis regularly crash. This modern stuff is a far cry from the fire trucks and school busses I drove in the '80s, or the 3/4 ton trucks back then.
The move managers auctioned off all of our motorcycles except the Scorpa in the bed here. I kept it out of sentiment. But it needs a complete going through if it's going to run. They got good prices for a lot of the stuff including motorcycle stuff, so even with their commission we were pretty happy with the deal. My wife hasn't ridden since the mid 2000s. She had a hard time parting with the '65 Superhawk and the giant pile of frames and parts because that meant she was never going to finish that project. I quit riding about five years ago after an idiot tourist pulled out of a blind driveway and then froze in the middle of the road when I came around the corner. I didn't quite stop and went over the back of the car. After that I decided that I did most everything I wanted to do with motorcycling and maybe I could limit my two wheel risks to bicycling. I'll miss the '76 Montesa Cota 348 because it was such a cool bike to look at, and a bike I wanted when I was in high school, but it was not all that great to ride.
The last trip was all the tractor attachments. My friend and neighbor brought his tractor over and we loaded them all with it.
I was so tired I waited a day before unloading them. But everything's unloaded and in the shop.
Now I have to seal the floor of the shop, which means moving everything around and cleaning up some more, and then unpack, build some cabinets and stands, etc. etc.
