Exercise (or, What I did on my Friday off)

I haven't had regular exercise since high school.  Well, college, if you count all the walking to and from class.  It wasn't till after I graduated from library school that I started gaining weight, really, but that also coincided with the magical metabolic shift that tends to happen in the mid-20s, so causality isn't entirely certain.

Anywho, the past several years of trying to find exercise options have boiled down to if we can't do it at home, we're not going to do it regularly enough to matter.  So our Christmas present to us this year:

My husband found it on Craigslist for about 1/8 of the list price; we just had to get it home.  Our friend Geoff, who has a truck, provided the vehicle, as well as help getting it into the truck, securing it, and then off the truck onto the front porch.  (Thanks again, Geoff!)  It was late and we were tired, and it was kinda wet from the rain, so we left it on the porch overnight to dry off.

So my project today:  Get elliptical machine off front porch and into living room.

The elliptical is 6 feet tall, 6.5 feet long, 27 inches wide, and weighs about 250 pounds.

First thing I learned:  The elliptical wouldn't fit through the front door the way we'd seated it (back end first).  So I took some more stuff off the porch (which is being used for temporary storage) so I had enough room to turn it around.

Great!  I turned it around.  I can't get the wheels up over the 2 inch lip of the door sill.  Those two blocks of wood on the table in the picture were my solution; I tilted it enough to get each under the front end, which let me just push the front piece over the sill.

Second thing I learned:  The elliptical wouldn't fit through the front door this way, either.  With the handles and the end pieces on, I just didn't have enough room to maneuver it around the corner of the front bedroom.  This turn:

That front piece with the wheels, though?  It's just bolted on with two bolts.  Ratchet to the rescue!  So I put a rag under the front end not to scratch up the floor, unbolted the front end, and basically just pushed the now-narrower elliptical in.  Great!

I can't lift it enough to put the front piece back on.  Ahem.

So obviously I needed to lever the front end up enough to do so.  Blocks of wood again!  One block to hold up the back end to put a block under the front was not entirely stable; I only knocked it off once, which took a little paint off the trim and slightly bent one of the metal tracks for the glides.  It still works, and no holes in the wall, so it's all good.

But one block of wood wasn't thick enough to lift the front enough to reattach the front piece, and I didn't have any thicker wood.  I wasn't sure going out and getting more blocks of wood would be stable enough to be safe; enter the 1918 Encyclopedia Americana.  Three volumes was enough to reattach the front piece, and then it was just a matter of wheeling it into place and putting back all the stuff I'd moved off the porch to maneuver it.

Voila!  Now how did I manage to spend more or less two hours manhandling the thing without throwing out my back?  I have no idea.