A Hair’s Breadth

One thing I’ll say about Marc; he has a real ability with mechanical things and figuring things like torsion, angles, compaction forces, mechanical advantage and how they all tie together to move and place things weighing tons by himself. And he did just that today with removing the 5000 pound 20 foot sea container from the 24 foot flatbed trailer.

He wasn’t even really sure it all would fit and it certainly wasn’t an easy thing to witness after he pulled our fifth wheel from its spot into the street and then started backing up with the tall load. On his first attempt he wasn’t close enough to our spa so couldn’t entirely turn the flatbed into the tight corner so he tried a second time and came within inches. As we scrambled to move things out of the way, he ended up needing to back the Freightliner all the way to practically touching the spa cover which was leaning against our original shed. Marc made comment this was a time when he really needed the smaller size of our Dodge. Finally, the flatbed sat at a 45 degree angle to the hitch on the Freightliner and unloading could commence.

The pictures tell most of the story—a harrowing day of working for hours on the herculean task of moving something so large into a tight space. The sea container couldn’t be allowed to do an uncontrolled fall off the back of the trailer because it was merely inches from our back block wall and also the storage shed we had just placed; and wasn’t all that far from the rear end of the park model. Once it finally touched ground, literally a hair’s breadth away from breaking out the shed window, it was an extremely tedious process of working the flatbed out from under it and carefully driving out with the container left suspended in the air by mere metal. From there, Marc’s dandy floor jack once again did its job and with help from the pipe saw horses Marc had made years ago, worked to ever-so-gently drop this giant to the ground. Whew! Success. There is nothing my husband can’t figure out a way to accomplish! Next up: painting everything outside to match and making a bunch of new window coverings to hide the Styrofoam that we had to place in the park model clerestory windows to block the heat and intense sun.