Things are really starting to shape up around here. We had some furniture delivered today and the living room is looking much better now that two really mangy sofas have been replaced with pretty new, comfy seating.
In preparation for the morning’s delivery, DH (dear husband) and I arose early so that we might clear some space for the new furniture. Now, nothing would have made me happier than kicking the old sofas out to the curb, never to be seen again. The upholstery is in very tough shape, the cushions are misshapen and worn out, and frankly, after 14 years, I’m tired of looking at them. But unfortunately, we still need to keep them around until we can afford to outfit the little den upstairs. So instead of discarding the worn out old beasts, we had to haul them up the stairs.
We started with the smaller one (the love seat) as a warm up to the larger piece (the couch). I wasn’t looking forward to the job, but certainly we’re both physically conditioned for it — we’ve moved our entire household twice in the past several months and DH and I have moved just about every piece of furniture and box ourselves (we had some help in the first move, but due to some last minute rescheduling, we ended up pretty much flying solo the second time), and we’ve both held up pretty well — until today, that is.
About a week ago, spaz that I am, I tripped and fell while carrying a new stool into the house. I didn’t want to drop the stool on the pavement, so I held it up in the air and let my knee take the hit. The injury wasn’t all that bad and the knee has been feeling much better in the past few days, but it doesn’t really bend all the way yet. Which of course means that when I should have been lifting with my knees, I was making my back do all the work. You can probably guess what happened next.
After all these months of moving furniture, boxes and other sundry household goods, my body finally gave out. On the up side, at least my back waited for us to be pretty much finished with all the hauling before it went on strike. We did get the love seat up the stairs, but there was no way that couch was going to go anywhere, and DH had to get to work.
Enter the two furniture delivery guys. The couch was in their way, so I asked them if they’d mind moving it upstairs before bringing in the new stuff. They tossed it around like it was made out of styrofoam, and moving it took only a few minutes. They were really nice about it, so I wanted to give them a good tip. But here’s an area where I suffer from a severe lack of experience — I don’t live in a big city where tipping is called for on a regular basis and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a purchase delivered to my home. I have no idea what is called for in this situation. These guys were working for a big chain store, so I wasn’t even sure if tipping would have even been expected if they didn’t do me this favor of moving the couch.
Just to keep it simple, I gave them twenty bucks apiece. On one hand, I think maybe paying $40 to get a couch moved up some steps is kinda steep, but on the other hand, a twenty spot isn’t even enough to buy a decent dinner for two anymore… I’m still not sure if I stiffed those guys or made their day…
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