Last night, Tim helped me move a sofa from the bedroom I use as my at-home office to the garage. There’s an awful lot going on in that sentence so let me break it down for you:

Tim usually comes over every Saturday night for dinner and a game of Spirit Island. Chances are very good he was not expecting me to prevail upon him to move a sofa. It wasn’t a very big or even a very heavy sofa, but when all he was expecting was pizza and a board game, I’m sure it was way more than he bargained for. I have to believe he would have come running if I’d asked him specifically to come help me move a sofa because that’s the kind of guy he is. Still, I feel a little guilty about springing my request on him with no prior warning.

There’s a tiny room off the hallway that might have been a bedroom at one time. In fact, it was Tim’s bedroom for a couple two-three years after we moved to the Madison area but when he moved out many years ago My Darling B had this idea that it would be our guest bedroom and it’s really not big enough to be anybody’s bedroom, not even a toddler’s. It’s maybe eight feet wide by ten feet deep and there are two doors that swing into the room, one for the entrance and one for the tiny closet. When Tim was living here, there was a bed on one wall and a desk on the other and barely enough room left over to walk.

After Tim moved out, My Darling B had this idea that Tim’s room would become our guest bedroom. To that end, we bought a sofa with a hide-a-bed inside it. This seemed like a good idea until we got the sofa into the room and discovered that, when the bed was unfolded, it filled the room. Literally. There was just barely enough room left over to open the door.

So the guest room got used twice, maybe three times by guests, every time by oldest son Sean when he came to visit. Sean is married now, so when he next came to visit with a family in tow, they stayed at a nearby hotel. The sofa bed became just a sofa, a spot where the cats slept occasionally. Other things besides cats piled up on it from time to time. The guest room became a storage room.

Then along came COVID and working from home. My Darling B and I needed separate spaces to work in. B set up her work space on a second-hand desk in her sewing room and I set up my work computer on a window shelf in the guest room, then on a desk I made by nailing legs to a slab of plywood. Eventually I bought a real, actual standing desk but no matter what kind of desk I worked from, it was always wedged into whatever space was left over after rearranging the sofa and the chest of drawers.

I might eventually get rid of the chest of drawers but for now it’s useful. The printer and the paper shredder are on top of it and the drawers are crammed full of papers and obsolete electronics and nerf guns, so it stays until I can figure out what to do with all that stuff. Coincidentally, these are the same reasons My Darling B has not discarded the second-hand desk in her sewing room. It’s big and heavy and gets in the way but she doesn’t want to even think about how to dispose of the piles of papers, old check books, birthday cards and other junk crammed into its drawers. Why do we live this way? No one I know can answer that question.

A couple months ago I asked My Darling B if we could get rid of the sofa bed and to my surprise she said yes. After talking over a bit more we decided to donate it to charity, and that’s when I found out that none of the local charities want sofa beds. I don’t know why, but every one of them makes a point of saying specifically they do not want sofa beds. A friend says it’s because sofa beds are too heavy but honestly our full-sized sofa weighs as much as our sofa bed, so that doesn’t make sense to me. Whatever the reason, donating the sofa bed to charity was not an option.

But I’m determined to get rid of that sofa bed. There’s a shop down the road that sells furniture on consignment. That seems like a good idea except that if nobody buys the sofa bed, I have to bring it back home. I really don’t want to do that. If I get rid of the sofa bed, I want it to stay gone. I might also just post it for sale on social media because I hear that works. I’m skeptical but only because I’ve never done that before.

However I do it, the first step to getting rid of the sofa bed was to get it out of the house because I didn’t want to sell it to someone, then tell them they would have to not only come get it but would also have to help me move it. Moving a sofa is not fun. Sofas are heavy and they have lots of big soft parts by design that are very difficult to get a grip on, making them extremely hard to pick up. If you have something valuable and you want to prevent thieves from stealing it, don’t lock it up in a safe, build a sofa around it. Nobody will walk off with it then.

There was no way I could think of to move the sofa myself. Likewise, it seemed unlikely that My Darling B would be able to assist me in moving the sofa out of the house. Tim, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who can not only figure out how to get things done, he is also the kind of guy who will usually not quit on a project once he has committed. So I asked him if he would help me move the sofa out to the garage, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t say yes. I didn’t expect him to say no, but I was still gratified that he didn’t hesitate for a second when I asked him, pretty much out of nowhere, if he’d be willing to help me wrestle a sofa out of a tiny room, wiggle it through a tiny door, carry it down a flight of weirdly-shaped stairs, and march up the driveway to the garage. He just said “Sure!” What a champ.

The hardest part of the move was probably getting it down the stairs. Squeezing it through the bedroom door was really hard, too. We tried three different ways to wriggle it out without taking the door off the hinges before we decided it couldn’t be done, shoved the sofa back into the room and pulled the pins on the hinges. With the door off it finally went, but it wasn’t easy.

Immediately after the sofa was out the door we had to turn a tight corner and squeeze it up the short hallway into the living room, pausing to move a bookcase out of the way. Dragging the sofa across the living room was the easiest part. Then we had to wiggle it out the front door which as thankfully wider than the bedroom door, so we didn’t have to take it off its hinges. Once we were out on the front stoop, however, things got tricky. Tim had to almost get under his end while I had to crouch to get low enough to get a grip on my end. Until we got it off the stoop, neither one of us felt entirely confident the sofa was under our control. Somehow we didn’t drop it. From there it was a short carry to the garage but we were already tired and sweaty so even though we were in the home stretch, we still had to put in a lot of effort to get there.

I already had a space cleared in the middle of the garage floor, so all we had to do was plop it down there. And then we huffed and puffed all the way back into the house. Now all I have to do is give it a good cleaning before finding a new home.