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Making Life Easier
Temporary Window Shades and Furniture Sliders
By Daniel McAdam
Sometimes - not always, but sometimes - you come across an idea that just amazes you with its simplicity. This recently happened to me twice.
I just moved into my new house in New Mexico. Moving is something I do all the time. Since the age of eighteen, I've never lived at one address more than three and a half years, and I've lived at a lot of addresses for a much shorter period of time.
On the other hand, moving has gotten significantly more complicated since I've gotten older. (Notice that I tactfully avoided saying, "since I got married.") Back in 1980, when I moved from Queens to California, it was a simple matter of throwing whatever I owned into the trunk or back seat of my Chrysler Cordoba. On this last move from Virginia, I ended up having close to 18,000 pounds of stuff transported, of which I really care about probably 1,000 pounds. Crazy, huh?
Anyway, the new house was brand new, meaning no one had ever lived in it before. It had lots of windows with no window coverings. Not wanting to invest a small fortune in curtains before we'd even moved in, we needed some sort of temporary solution. I suggested taping up the packing paper in the windows - expedient, if not attractive - but then someone where my wife works told her about temporary shades.
According
to their
website, RediShades have been around since 1991. The picture
at left is from the company's site - my shades look nice, too, but my
rooms are still full of unpacked boxes. Basically, they're pleated
paper shades with a self-adhesive strip at the top. You cut to
size with a utility knife (they come in 3-foot and 4-foot sizes), tape 'em
up, and you're done. Mine were purchased at Lowe's; I paid about
five bucks for the smaller ones, and six bucks for the larger ones.
Genius idea.
The other problem that we had to confront was that we had three heavy bookcases and weren't sure where to put them until long after the movers had gone. I'm not talking normal heavy bookcases, I'm talking the kind that would give Superman a hernia.
Fortunately, they were on the right floor, because there's no way the two of us could have gotten them up or down stairs. But trying to move just one of them from one room to another was a Herculean effort. Then I remembered (from where, I do not know) furniture gliders. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything on line, probably because they're not really called furniture gliders. They're called SuperSliders, and they're made by a company called Waxman.
SuperSliders are basically a set of four disks, smooth on one side and with a gripping side on the other. You slip one under each corner of a bookcase or other heavy item, smooth side down, and then slide the darn piece of furniture to where you want it. My advice: go with the bigger disks, the ones that look like small bread plates. The bigger the disk, the easier things slide. Another genius idea.
Now if I could just figure out how to get rid of at least half of my possessions before the next move . . .
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