Internet, I’m going to bestow two bits of (probably unsurprising) information on you:

1. Every single thing that you can think of involving letterpress printing is very.very.very.heavy.
My press weighs 1200 pounds. The type cabinet weighs about that much.
Galleys? You can’t lift them. Furniture? You have to remove half of it from the rack before you can even think about budging it.
Type? Leads? Well, they’re made of lead.

2. No one, and I mean NO ONE, wants to move a small print shop from Michigan to Brooklyn. After about a month straight of calling and explaining the situation and not getting callbacks and calling again and doing more and more searches for equipment movers and letterpress movers and regular movers and getting VERY VERY frustrated, I found Ken over at Allied movers of Lansing.

And guess what? He was awesome. He handled the first leg of the move, which I was (of course) very nervous about, since I was in Brooklyn and my awesome mom was overseeing.

But they knew exactly what they were doing and they had everything out in an hour and a half. I couldn’t believe it.

These are the guys who know exactly what they’re doing.

And before I tell you the second half of the story, first, can I say, that moving a heavy thing, or in this case, many heavy things, is a logistical nightmare. Having to be there when the movers arrive, trying to arrange a forklift (unsuccessfully, because everyone’s schedules are constantly changing) and trying to coordinate between 5 different people? Well, it’s pretty much impossible.

So, when the movers showed up on the Brooklyn end, they thought there was going to be a forklift there, and there wasn’t. Everything got off the truck eventually, but I almost had a nervous breakdown. Galleys spilled out in the truck, the police arrived, we blocked traffic on the entire street for 2.5 hours (and now all my new neighbors pretty much hate me), and we had to haul out a circular saw and cut a palette in half at one point. I think this image pretty much summed up the morning:

This is the guy that doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

But the press is inside, in one piece! Small victories!