Moving Water

I guess I should post this batch of pictures before the time drifts too far away for it to be relevant. I'm also not sure most of y'all will find this little story particularly entertaining, but my friend wants to have some kind of record in pictures. Remember not long ago we moved? Part of the moving adventure involved disassembling the waterbed. And... Here's pictures of how that went!

You're first thought might be "Waterbeds are still a thing?" and the answer would be... He's had that Waterbed for over 35 years. He'd be happy to describe the unique, amazing comfort, but that would be a painful reminder that this is currently in a storage unit. I guess that's a spoiler that we got the task done, but it was quite the day...

The first hurdle came early when the pump was not working. We've used this before to quickly slurp the water out, but this time was frustratingly not doing anything. We managed to take it apart and saw that one of the things was broke and the piece was jamming it, but removing the jam didn't fix it, and the whole thing was broken.

Since we had already paid for the U-Haul truck, for tomorrow, panic was creeping in. We had one whole day to get this bed apart, but it was still only one day. The first thought was to try the gravity-suction-thing. And it worked! Water was soon pouring into the large tub we were lucky to have. At quite a fast pace. He was taking buckets to the bathtub, but it was clear that this method would be completely exhausting and not sustainable. Might have made a good challenge for the show Survivor. You gotta dig deep!

Okay, the attempted upgrade to the plan was to attach the larger hose and drain it outside. Why carry buckets like an idiot? This would be much smarter, right?

Do-do-dooo.... The hose goes across the floor...

We had to leave the front door open for the hose, but it's not like we're leaving or anything.

The hose was super long. The idea was to get it to the back porch so we could keep an eye on it. So around the corner it goes.

For the record, we did try putting it out the nearby window instead of this, but the window was higher than the surface of the bed, so it wasn't working. This seemed like it was doing the trick.

Oof. The water was flowing, but it was quite slow. Was this the victory we were hoping for? Or should we just run to the store and buy a new pump? Eh, it was flowing... 

While waiting for the water to drain, we disassembled the desk. Taking things apart is a lot different than filling boxes. Between the desk and waterbed, that's a lot of the main functions of the apartment getting removed. It really felt like this was truly the point of no return. 

Can you believe in the middle of all this, the kitchen sink overflowed? The pipes are connected to the neighbor on the other side of this wall, and sometimes they jam it up and when they run the disposal it starts overflowing into our sink, and what a mess it made! Sure, let's clean up a ton of water over here! Argh?

It's been hours, and the water is trickling out slowly. Toooo slowly....

It looks like there's still half the water left! More panic? Not yet. But close.

Okay! After a little bit of fiddling-with, we got the water to flow at a much better pace. This is tons better.

The trick was to keep the hose as flat as possible. We used rocks and stuff to hold it down from the spots it was curled in.

Those looked like... Feathers? Inside the water? I mean, we have feather down pillows but there's no chance they got inside the mattress, right? It's possible they were some kind of growth happening in the mattress. Is this a gross mystery to explore?

Sometimes Minty in the foreground will un-focus the picture, so here's a rare non-Minty pic just to get a closer look at that... Stuff.

Whatever it was, there seemed to be a lot of it. It sort of collected all across the pavement as the water drained.

When the bed was nearly drained, we were able to pick up the whole thing and simply hold it up over the tub, to finish it off. There was a ton of gross orange goo in the bottom of the water.

Ahhh! Can I over-use the word "gross" at this point? My friend was sleeping on that? New Jersey water?

Well, that's it for the water mattress. It took a lot longer than we thought, but there's still more to do. Let's get this liner out next.

The heating pad was stuck to the bottom of the liner, like a sticker would be. We were wondering if we should keep them stuck together, or try and un-peel them and clean them up...

The smart move would have been to un-peel and clean them. That way they'd be ready for the next time. Except... when we tried it... the liner ripped! D'oh! Ruined. That's the thing that's supposed to hold the water if the mattress leaks. And it can't now do that with a large rip in it. So... Now if we need to re-assemble the waterbed, we'll need to get a new liner. Great. That's a problem for future-us at some point, I guess.

Moving on... The side panels are all unscrewed. Here's the panels on the bottom.

And underneath is what spreads-out the pressure of it across the floor. So it doesn't collapse under its own weight.

Oh yeah. At some point this back panel cracked and we re-enforced it with another board. Thanks, Past-Us.

And... It's done! Look at how clean that carpet is! That's 14-years-ago carpet we're looking at.

Poof! Like magic, we had an air mattress we can sleep on. All things considered, it's kinda comfy. No where near Waterbed-Comfy, but we were moving, and it had to be done. This one is quite a lot easier to deflate and move. It's mostly folding the blankets at this point.