We had to take the lumber delivery on a short notice. The warehouse where it was being stored was sold and the owner was anxious to clear it out. He offered to drive it up to Carpinteria from Van Nuys. They were supposed to arrive at 9:30p (already pretty late) but we got a call at 9:15p that they were just leaving.

At 11p, the big diesel rolled up and began manuevering to off load the lumber. Basically, he lifts the bed of the truck and the lumber slides to the ground with a big BANG! Great for the neighbors. The problem turned out to be that he needed more room than was available in the alley to pull his truck out after the dump. So he had to come in to the area at a pretty sharp angle. After about 45 minutes of bit by bit back and forth, he dumps the load. Now we had told him (many times) where the property line was and that we needed the lumber completely on our property. When he dumped the lumber, guess where it ended up? About 3/4th of it was on my neighbors property. And it was a loud BANG! But what do you do at midnight with 20,000 pounds of lumber?

In the morning (6 am), we went out and began moving the pile one piece at a time into the garage. By 7a we were ready for another method of moving. Pop went down to the rental yard and rented a forklift to move it in parts. First priority was to get the lumber off the neighbor’s property. They were planning on putting in a fence along the property line, and the lumber was in the way. Below is a picture of the lumber pile with Pop using the forklift to move it.

Oh, did I say Pop was moving the lumber pile with the forklift? I meant he tried to move the lumber pile with the forklift. Check out what happend when he got the forks under a part of the pile.

The forklift was stuck. Not only were the steering wheels off the ground, but there was no room to steer out between the orange tree, the footings and the garage. We finally got out by folding up the forks to get the 4 extra feet of steering room.

We ended up moving each piece of lumber by hand into the garage. We organized it by putting what we will use later on the bottom and what will be used first near the top. Craig, our neighbor on whose property the lumber was sitting, came over to help move the lumber and Paul Anderson, our sometimes helper, was there for a couple of hours as well. All in all, it was basically an all day task for Pop and me to move that lumber, even with a couple of hours of help from the other 2 guys.

And I haven’t yet mentioned that the back of Pop’s Isuzu stakebed truck was filled with additional lumber that needed to be off loaded. More on that later.