I am thinking this post may have been better titled...how I spent my day off!! I was supposed to be at work but got to come home early. I came home to this!!! Chris had this brilliant idea to move the playhouse from over by the volleyball court to up by the play set. We are hoping to put a fire pit in where the playhouse used to be. It started with throwing ideas around as to how to get the house on the trailer so as to tow it up the hill and drop it on the new foundation. Sounds really simple, right??
This was the original plan to lift the house onto the trailer. Notice the piece of wood holding up both the house and the trailer.
Then we realized we could just push the trailer up under the already jacked up house and drop it down. Notice how Chris has his foot in the door to hold the front end of the house on the trailer!! We tied it down to the trailer and were off and running. Another important piece of this picture is how incredibly happy Chris still looks...that will change!
This is what happened to the trailer when we tried to drive it down the hill. Notice the trailer up by Chris' face and the hitch down by his knees. The trailer was way too back heavy and kept slipping off the hitch. Also of note, is that it was 85 outside yesterday!!
So now we had a trailer stuck on the hill and the car at the bottom of the hill. With no budging from either :( Frustration had begun to set in at this point!! After much debate, we jacked up the back of the playhouse and added another toe strap to hold the front of the house down. Then we were able to reattach the hitch and continue on our merry way.
Until...we got around the side of the house and it fell off the hitch again. Mind you, each time it fell off I screamed and ran to see if it had damaged my car, Chris jumped out to see what happened, then we had to start over with the (now very frustrated) discussion of what next. After both of us standing on the front of the trailer, we got it reattached to the car and wrapped the chains around as tight as possible to hold it together.
Then, we dropped the concrete sink on the front to add a little more weight....and started moving again.
For about another 50 feet when it popped off again!!!! The pictures become sparse at this point since we were so hot, tired, sunburned, and frustrated the camera was no longer worth the laugh.
That will hold right??? And Chris had a wonderful idea to drive the car in reverse thus forcing the back heavy trailer to actually help hold the hitch in place. We made it up to the new landing place in reverse, however the door was backwards so we decided to drive the car around the play set and then back the house onto the new foundation (which is a bunch of cinder blocks we had now moved as well).
This is where the pictures ended!! The landing place is supposed to be on the RIGHT side of the play set. We came over the ridge and the trailer popped off for one last time. We were both so frustrated at this point we came inside to take a break and just regroup (oh, and get our kids who were napping all the while). In the meantime, Chris' parents came over (a visit already planned) and he and his dad got it moved the rest of the way with one driving and the other riding on the front of the trailer to balance the weight.
So, we started about 11am and at 5pm it was in the final resting place. A stone's throw from where it started!! Only took us a few hours, lots of sweat, much frustration, and a couple nasty sunburns.
At least we are still able to laugh about the whole process :)
Then the boys had a mini egg hunt at school this week. Just to mix things up a little, Saturday morning we joined friends for Earth Day Omaha and helped with The Great Cloth Diaper Change (attempting to set a world record for most cloth diapers changed). We headed home for naps, then off to celebrate Easter with Chris' family...
