[ Frank, a big black pickup, seen from behind and to the side; there’s a whole tall stack of styrofoam insulation taking up most of the bed and sticking several feet off the tailgate. ]
What with one thing & another (& with MANY thanks to y’all for continuing to support us, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) I managed to order almost everything we need for this summer’s construction plans in one shot, & a week or so later, me & Morgyn drove down to Canon City again to pick it all up.
Getting it all loaded didn’t go near so smoothly as last time, mostly because the hardware store employees in question didn’t have a lot of confidence in our ability to make everything fit. (As it happened we COULD have fit everything in & on the van; it wouldn’t have been a good idea, but it would have been POSSIBLE. HA.)
But eventually we got it all more-or-less stuck more-or-less where we wanted it, used every strap & bungee cord we had, & drove home.
… to be fair, the van looked like this, & that’s AFTER I’d unloaded a bunch of it. Remy for scale:
[ Remy, a big black puppy with a white streak on his chest and white toes, sits proudly in the back of the van, tongue hanging out. He’s guarding a stack of plywood taller than he is, with three sheets of styrofoam insulation in top of that; lumber sits on top of the plywood, and in the gap between the stack and the right side of the van, and there’s a small pile on the ground. That’s a LOT of sticks, is what. ]
One of the people who helped us out (I suspect she had grandchildren) advised us about eight times not to stop too fast. I explained to her that I was pretty sure we weren’t doing ANYTHING fast, because: no. & then we drove home REAL SLOW.
Unloading all that took time — we haven’t even touched the plywood yet, I want a couple pallets in place to stack it on before we start, but at least I got all the lumber out over a couple days. By which I mean ‘out’, no more than that.
[ A big pile of lumber in various sizes, lengths, and treatments. It’s sitting on the ground anyhow, like a pile of pick up sticks. Or like it was flung out of the van one stick at a time, with no regard to where it landed other than ‘out’, which is in fact what happened. ]
But! It’s getting sorted! Little by little! One step at a time!
[ There are three small neat piles of lumber on the ground. One holds two boards, one holds six, and the third and largest, a stack of two by fours on a long pallet, holds eleven. Look, it’s a work in progress. ]
VERY small steps.
