It was a cold November morning... and we had a lot of work ahead of us. We had to drive all the way to Austin from San Antonio, and rent a truck from Home Depot. We grabbed some quick grub after stumbling out of the house with our over anxious mindsets. We had brought our gloves and safety glasses just in case things got crazy. I had found a local landscaping company that was selling railroad ties for 16.50 a piece. They were located near the Austin airport. This was the closest I could find, approximately 30 miles from the house. So I found the closest Home Depot and rented the pickup truck with adjustable bed on it... to allow for loading and unloading. By adjustable, I mean that the sides and tailgate all can be lowered down to the sides. Don't worry, the pics will show what I mean. I figured that this was a pretty darn good price, so I bought 12. At first I thought that I would have this system that would allow me to setup multiple stacks and evenly distribute the weight of the container over 4 sets of three that are stacked in a specific way. 2 on the bottom and 1 on the top, thus 4 sets of three to divide the weight. Turns out that I really could not manhandle those damn things. They weighed at least 150 lbs each, but honestly, I bet more, because moving them at all was really, really hard. So trying to move them around, while working UNDER the container that was 3 feet off the ground was rather exhausting. Just trying to slide them off of the truck was a task within itself.
Me after we just rented the truck, talk about excited!
My co-pilot/navigator's view from inside the cockpit.
This is the stack of railroad ties at Whittlesey Landscaping Supplies.
This is one of the best ways, IMO, to rent a truck for work like this... Uhaul's just don't work the same.
We had to pick out the ones that we wanted... some were in pretty bad shape.
This is how Whittlesey loaded our truck... man I wished I had one of those at the homestead.
My bestest friend.
Loading up the railroad ties onto the forklift.
A shot of the truck with 2 of the sides lowered for loading purposes.
Annette tried to pick up one of the railroad ties and got her sleeve stuck in between... she got the sleeve all dirty with this brown residue... she turned to me and made this face... lucky me, I was able to get it in the pic.
Loading more railroad ties.
Loading them onto the truck.
They stuck about 2 inches off the back of the truck... so the tailgate did not really shut right.
By now we had a helper... this made me wonder... how hard it would be to move these dang things.
Almost loaded up.
Last one loaded up! We are on our way to get these things dropped off at the homestead. The next post will show what it was like to drop them off.
Very cool!! Can't wait to see how you guys moved those things.
ReplyDelete