In July 2004 when the move from Illinois to Kansas was completed a considerable amount of stuff was in storage. Anticipating that a 2000 square foot house, with lots of storage and a generously large garage, wasn’t going to fit into a 1000 square foot apartment with very little storage room, I had a storage locker rented, and a U-Haul truck reserved the day the movers arrived with their semi. The plan was to have them off load some items directly onto the U-Haul so it could be taken immediately to the storage facility and locked away. This plan worked flawlessly until yesterday.
Sibylle and I are moving in to a townhouse where a queen-sized bed will fit far more comfortably than a king-sized. So we planned on pulling my queen-sized bed (mattress, box springs, frame, and headboard) out of storage and storing the king-sized one. After several weeks of delaying this task we finally had a pickup truck, and strong back in the form of a co-worker, yesterday to make this possible. The townhouse has a split staircase, you go up 5 steps to a landing turn 90 degrees to the left and continue up to the second floor. The ceiling over the stairs isn’t any too high, in fact it wasn’t quite high enough to fit the box springs through. It took considerable effort by all three of us, several tries, and strap cinched around the springs to compress them a bit, to squeeze through the narrow opening. Actually, in places the opening isn’t quite as narrow as it was before.
When we took the box off the springs early on in this ordeal I remarked that I didn’t remember the springs as having a turquoise blue color. I remembered it as being white. Much later, after fitting a 60-inch wide box springs through a 57-inch wide hole, I noticed that the mattress was also blue, had a large stain on it, and came from Sears, not Sealy. The dawning realization was that by not looking in the boxes 37 months ago before it went into storage, I had accepted the wrong mattress and box springs from the movers.
This would be comical if we hadn’t worked for thirty minutes to force the springs one inch at a time up the stairs and around the landing to the second floor. It’ll take a chainsaw to get it out of the house.
First thing this morning I called the Allied mover in Springfield that had been employed three years ago to see what, if anything, could be done. The mover was sympathetic and passed me on to the claims department. I’ve left a message with them and am very curious what they’ll say when the call back.
Of course this means that somewhere, someone else moved and when they took the boxes off the mattress and springs that were delivered by Allied their 20-year old, sway backed and stained, Sears model had magically transformed itself into a barely used 9-year old Sealy Posturepedic. And obviously they didn’t file a claim as their sleep solution had gotten considerable better in the bargain.