wish lists

[juldea]

So I have this Amazon wish list, but man is Amazon inadequate for this. Right now, the expensive things I want for myself are the piano from quish (looks like it's going to be about $400 to get movers for it), multiple classes from the Cambridge Center for Adult Education (Thai Cooking for Beginners! Quilting!) and other similar places (Sewing Intensive!), a gym membership, and other things of the class variety.

Material goods are so passe!

Comments

[goldbug.livejournal.com]

But you can add them (at least the things with webpages) with Amazon's universal wish list tool. It's snazzy.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

This is not something I know about! I shall investigate.

[scirocco.livejournal.com]

Hey, wait wait. I thought that Piano was showing up at your place this weekend?

[juldea.livejournal.com]

That was a nice plan, but it didn't survive first contact with the enemy. (Being both quish's moving stress and my own inability to get enough people to move it.)

[freerange-snark.livejournal.com]

Will the piano fit in the bed of a pickup truck? Zipcar has a few available in the city. You'd need something you could use as a ramp and some heavy-duty moving straps, but that's got to be cheaper than paying movers. Plus, if you can pull the truck close enough to your front door, you can put the end of the ramp inside the threshold and skip the steps altogether.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Have you ever tried to move a piano? They are heavier than any other object I have ever heard of moving; more than refrigerators, any type of furniture, ANYTHING! They're the only household object I know that sometimes requires a crane to move. Shogunhb recommended I try to get 5-6 people to move it (when using amateurs) after he just moved it from one room of quish's place to another. I dread the thought of any steps, the thought of trying to get one into a pickup truck is (to me) so absurd as to not even be thinkable.

Also, there's fence outside my front "yard", so there's no backing up to the porch there. :( If that were doable, I MIGHT think about trying it.

Basically, the <$400 price is good enough for me as a "don't have to worry about it" price.

[freerange-snark.livejournal.com]

They are heavier than any other object I have ever heard of moving; more than refrigerators, any type of furniture, ANYTHING!

Depends a lot on the type of piano--some are pretty light and on wheels. But if this isn't one of those, then I think you're well justified to pay the money and let someone who knows what they're doing muscle that kind of beast around.

[dylanesque29.livejournal.com]

The Amazon Wishlist is the natural enemy of my bank account. "Ooooh, gotta have this!"

[nightskyre.livejournal.com]

Paying that kind of money is not necessary.

You can rent a truck the size Quish got for a lot less, and get a bunch of people on a mutually agreeable date. The truck she got had a lift on it, so getting into and out of the truck is trivial. I've moved pianos before. I even helped move a baby grand once. Most recently, four guys moved a piano down a flight of stairs, out a door, down wet snowy stairs outside, and onto a trailer. Most uprights will actually tolerate lying on their back fairly well. I know evan712 owns a trailer that might be large enough, and I own a truck.

It's not trivial, but it can be done with proper planning. The issue, at least for me, was the dramatically short notice.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Well, I posted and I didn't get any responses of, "I would help, but that day is bad," except for the one of, "I will help later in the day if you still need it," so the assumption of "this is too much burden to ask of my friends and no one wants to help" wasn't too out in left field, I think. It's NOT trivial, and trying to coordinate the number of people I'd need and the truck and the stairway navigation will involve me putting a lot of stress on friends. Quish wants the piano out by the end of the month, and I've already been told by people that every weekend this month is booked with weddings and other things that I assume most everyone is going to and therefore unable to help me move.

So no, paying that amount of money is not ultimately necessary, and if you want to coordinate this for me I'll pay it to you instead, but I put a lot of stock in the "paying some people to do it for me so I don't have to worry about it and guilt and nag my friends into helping me just so they can shut me up" cost.