MIRROR, MIRROR – OFF THE WALL

Unlike most jobs, being a removalist means you’re invited into people’s homes every day. That means you get to see all sorts of things, and you build up a collection of stories – be it furniture that’s tricky to move, funny things that happen on the job or how we dealt with a dog that went on the attack while our arms were full with some delicate antique.

That’s why we’ve launched this blog as part of China Bear’s brand-new website – to give you a bit of insight into the life of a mover.

You face a lot of different challenges when you’re dealing with people’s prized possessions. This week, for example, we had to move a mirror. Not just any mirror – this was a designer piece of art that’s 180cm wide by 2.4m tall, and shaped like the sun, with long metal arms twisting out from the centre. Obviously that made a bit of hard work for the fellas, as it had to be handled very carefully.

Before we even got there, the owner was very clear about how we should treat her mirror, saying, “I don’t want any more twists or turns to be added.”

Under her watchful eye, we set up a scaffold on the staircase to lift the artwork down before strapping it into a cargo net, inside a specially designed crate.

It was actually the second crate we’d built for that mirror, because our salesman forgot the old “100mm rule” on his tape measure, which meant the first one was just a bit too small. So we’ve got a spare crate here if anyone needs a slightly smaller sculpture moved…

In the end, we got the mirror over to Rose Bay with no dramas – only to find it doesn’t fit on the wall in the new house!

The owner will have to get some modifications to her staircase before she can display the sun, so at the moment it’s still suspended in that crate, awaiting a new dawn.