Basement Staxx

This afternoon I met up with Sam and Marta for a mission in Lewisham for Mr K.

Mr K currently finds it uncomfortable to sleep in his home. To make things better for him, his occupational therapist would like to install a hospital bed in his living room. However, first some space flneeds to be made for it. GoodGym were asked to help with this by moving a single divan bed, a couple of armchairs and a table from Mr K's living room to his cellar.

With one of our four person team out of action (Anna was unfortunately feeling unwell this morning and so couldn't make it), we knocked at Mr K's door when we three of us had assembled.

There was no answer. We definitely hadn't used gentle hands with our knocks, having already been told that Mr K is a little hard of hearing, so we waited a few minutes before trying again. There was still no answer. Our back-up option of calling his mobile also fell flat after reaching his answerphone message.

We were slightly flummoxed at this point, but then a friendly neighbour ran up to us: Mr K had been taken into hospital the night before, but she had some keys that we could use to get into his flat to move the furniture. Although we were slightly apprehensive about using her keys, she assured us that it would be better if we went ahead anyway, so we did.

After identifying the furniture in the living room to be moved, we scoped out the cellar. There was plenty of room there for the furniture, but we spent a few minutes making some extra space just in case by stacking a few items on top of each other.

First to go into the cellar was the smaller of the two armchairs. This just about fit (it helped that one of the armrests was broken), which was good but wasn't too encouraging a forecast for moving the second, larger, armchair. True to our expectations, the second armchair just refused point blank to even leave the living room. Rather than get hung up on its tantrum, we moved onto moving the bed and resolved to see what we could do with it later.

Both the bed base and the mattress were super light, but only the mattress was flexible enough to bend around the requisite corners to get into the cellar. After trying several different configurations for the base, which resulted in the base getting caught on hinges, floors and a ceiling in various orientations, we decided that the simplest thing would be to simply return to base to the living room and stand it on its end in the corner (presumably a time-out corner).

Last to be moved was the coffee table. This went down the stairs with barely a whimper, rendering it unworthy of further consideration.

Before leaving, we spent a few minutes more moving furniture around within the living room itself to try and maximise space for a hospital bed: this mostly involved putting a sofa and the toddler-esque armchair up against the same wall as the bed and making sure that all of the doors into the room could open/close.

Job done to the best of our abilities, we popped the keys through the neighbour's door, toasted my 200th mission (woot! 🎉) with some cakes (woot woot! 🎉), and made our goodbyes.

Sam, I hope your holiday goes smoothly over the next few weeks, and I expect I'll see both of you around GoodGym in the near future. Anna, you were missed and I hope you feel better soon! (Also, I ate your share of the cakes 😅😎👍🏻)