Huge, huge thank you to the wonderful folks at Evans Transfer who generously donated time, manpower and trucks to make this move happen. We could not have moved all this furniture without them -- they were wonderful from start to finish.
How did we get the furniture, you ask?
Steptoe & Johnson - a local law firm that began in Clarksburg, WV, almost 100 years ago at this point -- just moved to their gorgeous new office building. They ended up building their own office space because their old rented space was, honestly, just not working for them any longer (you can see wallpaper peeling off the walls on a couple of the floors now that the furniture is out because the internal humidity makes the glue disintegrate on those floors, just for starters).
It was a shame that it came to that, frankly, for downtown Clarksburg's sake, but given that one of the building's elevators broke down -- again -- between when we moved on Thursday and Monday morning when we came back to finish? I can see why they needed to make a change.
(On a personal note, it was weird walking through the empty building, having been in it so many times over the years that my husband has worked there. Our daughter crawled down those hallways more than a few times, until she graduated to toddling and then walking/skipping them when we would go to visit daddy at the office, and he graduated from a baby lawyer upward there as well. Ahhh, good times. But I digress...)
Steptoe generously offered furniture from the old offices that wouldn't work in their new space to several local organizations and schools, including not only St. Mary's Elementary, but also Notre Dame High School, Heritage Christian School, the Boy Scouts, several municipalities and civic organizations, Hope Inc. (which works locally with domestic violence issues), the local YWCA, and a whole host of other groups as well.
What was St. Mary's able to get? Here's a partial list:
- At least 10 tall metal bookshelves, single-sided, plus 1 tall wooden bookshelf.
- 6 small, two-shelf bookshelves. Wish we'd been able to snag more of these, as they work perfectly in the Pre-K through 1st grade classrooms. But the ones we brought to the school are lovely -- and sturdy, too, which is wonderful.
- 3 smaller plastic shelf units like you would use in a garage -- we thought this would be perfect shelving to store art supplies or other bits and pieces in the school if we can get some big plastic bins for organization.
- 10 AV carts, 1 larger AV table, and 2 small AV carts.
- 19 computer tables, in varying sizes.
- 4 filing cabinets plus 1 tall locking metal upright cabinet.
- 11 desks, including 2 nice wooden desks and two with an L-shaped return attached, one of which is to be the new office secretary desk where the kids enter the office -- it looks lovely. (There may have been one additional desk, because we picked up an extra the last moving day -- but I think it replaced an additional one that went missing on our inventory sheet, so I'm not certain it was a net gain after all. There was so much stuff, it was hard to keep track by the second moving day -- thank goodness I did the initial inventory list or we would have been utterly lost.) UPDATE: Hmmm, looking through my notes, it might have ended up being only 10 desks total in the end. We had tagged more, but some weren't there when we got to those floors to move them.
- Assorted other bits and pieces of furniture, including some coat racks, a library cart with a bit of a shimmy (the nice one we had tagged disappeared from the building between my inventory day and moving day, alas, along with a couple of desks we had tagged -- we should have taped down the tags instead of using post-it notes, I suppose, but we got so much lovely stuff that I really can't complain at all), a couple of nice wooden cabinets, and a mail sorter/mailbox hutch, and several other little things.
We also obtained several exceptionally nice forest green library shelves in varying sizes -- some are doubled sided shelving units with either two, three or four book sections, some are single-sided single shelves. The total tally on those was:
- 2 double-sided, double-shelf units
- 4 double-sided, triple-shelf units
- 2 double-sided, quad-shelf units
- 5 single-sided, single-shelf units
All are very sturdy metal, and came with dividers/bookends that are attached to the shelf and can be moved around as the library collection grows.
We can tab these with Dewey Decimal classifications for nonfiction, or alphabetical and/or series tabs for fiction or, because the shelves are metal, we can get the magnetic label holders and those will easily be movable as the collection grows and changes through the years.
These library shelves were a fairly recent purchase for Steptoe, so they are relatively new with little wear and tear, built to hold law reference books, and will last the school for years and years to come. The shelves are the whole reason I got involved with the furniture donation in the first place -- and I am beyond thrilled that the school was able to get them for their library. UPDATE: I meant to also say that they are also re-configurable a bit, so we can use a quad-shelf unit, say, as a double by not putting the other two units into the initial building. So we can build them to suit the library space instead of having to shoe-horn them in -- but if the space gets changed at any point, they can be reconfigured to fit that space. Useful, huh?
So much so that I spent all of Thursday taking them all apart so that they could be moved. And I have the hitch in my shoulder to prove it. (Getting old sucks, doesn't it?!?)
The shelves come apart into individual little parts and can then be rebuilt piece by piece. I took pictures of the assembly steps along the way so I'd remember how everything goes back together. It's sort of like building with Tinker Toys or an erector set (remember those?), but with heavier, sturdier metal.
It has taken a long 3-hour walk-through to initially tag furniture, then another 4 and a half hour jaunt (with half the elevators out of service that day, so I got my cardio in doing the stairs! LOL) to inventory what we had tagged and then come home and type it up so we had a good list to work from for the movers. Plus, we've had two full days of moving over the course of the last 2 weeks.
I'm tired, but very happy that it all worked out for St. Mary's. Thankfully, I don't have figure out where the various bits and pieces of furniture that weren't immediately placed in classrooms get to go.
I'm so thrilled about the library shelves and am excited to finally get them set up and help to organize the library as soon as the interior work is completed on last winter's water damage. The roofing work is almost finished on the outside, and once the interior repairs are done, I can finally start to help with the library.
Once things get a little more settled and the library can finally have new shelves set up in it, I promise a picture or two of what the "Library Moms" finally are able to do with them. Can you tell I'm excited?
(Photo via ChicagoGeek. Seemed appropriate.)
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