#rabbit movers

[davio1962]

Well, this is disturbing.

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MetalHare by Ralph Niese.

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It's past midnight, and I'm packing up the last of my belongings before I ditch the Upper East Side for Murray Hill in the afternnoon. While I survey the colossal mess, the piles of boxes, and mounds of dust gathering in the corners of my apartment, I reflect on how different this move is from the last one. August 30, 2005. I’ll never forget that day – the day I moved from Vancouver, Canada, to New York with nothing more than a suitcase and two boxes full of clothes, books, and a few personal belongings. That day, my apartment seemed so bleak, with its bare white walls and a single mattress on the floor (the few pieces of furniture I had purchased had yet to arrive). Homesickness, loneliness, and regret hit me immediately. I didn’t know anyone in Manhattan, I missed my family, and I couldn’t stand the noise of the city. The idea that I was going to have to live here for next two years terrified me. What the hell had I gotten myself into? Who in their right mind would even want to leave Vancouver? I wanted to turn around and take the earliest flight back to Canada. Four and a half years later, I am still in Manhattan, and it seems inconceivable that I once hated the city. Shortly before I left Vancouver, my brother-in-law predicted that the NYC would harden me. Perhaps it has, but I think more importantly, it has made me the person I am today – better, stronger, and more confident. Some moves are simply a change in one’s dwelling place (like my upcoming one), but others can change a person for better or for worse.

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The Village Move Getting home from teaching at the local primary school one day, I arrived at my house nestled in the middle of a coastal village in Tonga. The chief of the village and his wife were sitting in my living room when I opened the door. Some of their furniture had already been moved into my house and it looked like they were moving in with me. I found this strange, but hey it’s Tonga, and I did not want to ruin my ties with them, so I just asked them how they were and then sat down. They proceeded to ask me if I was happy in Tonga, I mean I had been there a little over a year as a Peace Corps volunteer in their village and I spoke the language, taught English at their schools and worked with the youth on projects. I was one of the more positive volunteers always trying to keep myself busy and out in the village. The chief went on to tell me that he and his wife would be moving back into my house and that I would need to move to the city. The city was over an hour away and definitely not where I wanted to be since we had youth projects going on out in the village that took awhile to get started up in the first place, and I only had eight months left in Tonga. Why didn’t the chief understand that? We had never seen eye to eye on much and so I knew arguing with him would not solve the problem I found a couple of suitcases and boxes and packed up a few things and left for the city with a friend who picked me up. That was the first time I really felt lost when I was in Tonga. I always had close Tongan friends around me in the village, but now I was out in the city without a plan or a home. A couple of nights passed and I began getting calls from the youth out in my village telling me that they stood up to the chief and they wanted me to come back. They said they would provide me with a house and that they were painting it and getting it all set up for me. A few days later I moved into the house and back into the village. You could tell the youth had renovated the house Tongan style. I had a kitchen table but it was more like a slab of wood being held up loosely by four wooden sticks. Also, the bed they had moved in for me sunk in about a foot deep in the middle of the mattress so that took some skill to sleep on. It was the rats, mice and cockroaches in this new place that drove me a little crazy, and laying out poison for them just didn’t do the trick. I didn’t have the luxury of a shower, I had to go out back and collect the rain water from a tank and shower using a cup. I actually got used to all of these new changes in my life though, and really learned how to live like a Tongan.. Tongans were never afraid of mice, rats or cochroaches, and none of them had the luxury of a shower, or firm bed to sleep on. We were equal now. The chief of the village ended up being kicked out of office a few months later when it was discovered that he had been stealing money from the village bank account. The youth grew and I was happier in Tonga then I could have ever imagined in my ‘new’ home. I was accepted by the Tongans in a different way now, it wasn’t a false acceptance anymore, it was real. Looking back on it I am so glad the chief decided to kick me out of my ‘Peace Corps house’… I wouldn’t have really known Tonga if he hadn’t made that move.

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The History of the Cardboard Box

The cardboard box goes largely unappreciated. Yet, it is indispensable to our daily living. It holds all of our knick-knacks and personal mementos when we move or have things shipped. It holds our breakfast cereal. It has been used for countless children’s art projects; fashioned into a robot head or a horse’s body. Heck, it is even in the International Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York. As with a lot of things that have become commonplace, hardly any thought has been put into how and why it is was invented and by whom. In fact, the history of the cardboard box, besides rarely being talked about, isn’t particularly well documented either. However, cobbled together through several sources,  patents, and old forgotten texts, we can start to piece together the story of the ubiquitous cardboard box.

It seems the beginnings of cardboard dates back to China, about three or four thousand years ago. During the first and second century B.C., the Chinese of the Han Dynasty would use sheets of treated Mulberry tree bark (the name used for many trees in the genus Moras) to wrap and preserve foods. This fact is unsurprising considering the Chinese are credited with the invention of paper during the Han Dynasty, perhaps even around the same time (the earliest paper ever discovered was an inscription of a map found at Fangmatan in the Gansu province).

Paper, printing, and cardboard slowly made its way west thanks to the silk road and trade among the empires of Europe and China. While cardboard likely ended up in Europe much earlier than the 17th century, the first mention of it comes from a printing manual entitled Mechanick Exercises, which was written by Theodore Low De Vinne (well-known scholarly author of typography) and Joseph Mixon (a printer of math books and maps, while also believing, rather bizarrely, that the Arctic was devoid of ice because there was sunlight there 24 hours a day). In the manual, it reads:

Scabbord is an old spelling of scabbard or scale-board, which was once a thin strip or scale of sawed wood…. The scabbards mentioned in printers’ grammars of the last century were of cardboard or millboard.

Through this description, it is inferred that cardboard was used as printing material and to be written on, rather than in box form and for storage.

The first documented instance a cardboard box being used was in 1817 for a German board game called “The Game of Besieging,” a popular war strategy game. Some point to an English industrialist named Malcolm Thornhill being the first to make a single-sheet cardboard box, but there is scant evidence of who he was or what he stored in the cardboard box. It would be another forty years before another innovation rocked the cardboard world.

In 1856, Edward Allen and Edward Healey were in the business of selling tall hats. They wanted a material that could act as a linear and keep the shape of the hat, while providing warmth and give. So, they invented corrugated (or pleated) paper. Corrugated paper is a material typically made with unbleached wood fibers with a fluted sheet attached to one or two linear boards. They apparently patented it in England that same year, though English patents from prior 1890 are notoriously difficult to find and most have yet to be digitized, so we weren’t able to read over the patent as we normally would while researching.

Who knows if Albert Jones of New York ever encountered an Allen/Healey tall English hat, but the next fold in the cardboard story belongs to Mr. Jones. In December of 1871, Albert Jones was awarded a patent in the United States for “improvement in paper for packing.” In the patent, he describes a new way of packing that provides easier transportation and prevents breakage of bottles and vials. Says the patent,

The object of this invention is to provide means for securely packing vials and bottles with a single thickness of the packing material between the surface of the article packed; and it consists in paper, card-board, or other suitable material, which is corrugated, crimped, or bossed, so as to present an elastic surface… a protection to the vial, and more effective to prevent breaking than many thicknesses of the same material would be if in a smooth state like ordinary packing-paper.

The patent goes on to make clear that this new packing method isn’t just relegated to vials and bottles, pointing out it could be used for other items, as well as not limited “to any particular material or substance, as there are many substances besides paper or pasteboard which can be corrugated for this purpose.”

A few years after this, the cardboard box that we know and love finally, quite literally, took shape. The Scottish-born Robert Gair owned a paper bag factory in Brooklyn. In 1879, a pressman at his factory didn’t see that the press rule was too high and it reportedly cut through thousands of small seed bags, instead of creasing them, ruining them all before production was stopped and the problem fixed.

Gair looked at this and realized if sharp cutting blades were set a tad higher than creasing blades, they could crease and cut in the same step on the press. While this may seem like an obvious thing, it’s not something any package maker had thought of before. Switching to cardboard, instead of paper, this would revolutionize the making of foldable cardboard boxes. You see, in the old way, to make a single sheet folding box, box makers would first score the sheets using a press, then make the necessary cuts with a guillotine knife by hand.  Needless to say, this made mass producing foldable boxes prohibitively expensive.

In Gair’s new process, he simply made dies for his press such that the cutting and creasing were accomplished all in one step. With this modification, he was able to cut about 750 sheets in an hour on his press, producing about the same amount in two and a half hours on one single press as his entire factory used to be capable of producing in a day.

At first, Gair’s mass-produced foldable boxes were mostly used for small items, like tea, tobacco, toothpaste, and cosmetics. In fact, some of Gair’s first clients were the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, Colgate, Ponds, and tobacco manufacturer P. Lorillard. However, in 1896, Gair got his biggest client yet for his pre-cut, pre-creased cardboard box – the National Biscuit Company, or Nabisco, with a two million unit order. With this leap in product packaging, now customers could purchase pre-portioned crackers in a wax-paper lined box that kept the crackers fresh and unbroken. Before this, when buying these crackers, they’d have a store clerk get them from a less moisture and vermin controlled cracker barrel.

From here, sales of such boxes exploded and by the turn of the century, the cardboard box was here to stay. So next time you are loading your closet with cardboard boxes full of old clothes, buying something off of Amazon, or just opening a box of saltine crackers, you can thank a German board game for first commercially using a cardboard box and one of Robert Gair’s employees slipping up, inspiring a small but momentous tweak that made mass-produced, foldable cardboard boxes possible.

Bonus Fact:

Legend has it that Robert Gair’s son, George, named the biscuits that Nabisco were putting in Gair’s cardboard boxes. According to the book Cartons, Crates and Corrugated Board, by Diana Twede, Susan E.M. Selke, Donatien-Pascal Kamdem, and David Shires, Gair’s son told the executives that the biscuits “need a name.” This, supposedly, inspired them to call them “Uneeda Biscuits.”

This article was originally posted on Today I Found Out.

Did you know we sell supplies and can even deliver the supplies before your move date?

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No Pants Subway Ride

The No Pants Subway Ride is a annual event that takes place every year in January on the New York City Subway. I’m sure you’ve seen at least group of pant-less riders in your life. (We said group, the man in W 4th does not count...) Have you ever wanted to participate? Well tomorrow is your lucky day!

Here’s a little history about the No Pants Subway Ride:

“The No Pants Subway Ride is an annual event staged by Improv Everywhere every January in New York City. (The date changes from year to year and is announced in early December.) The mission started as a small prank with seven guys and has grown into an international celebration of silliness, with dozens of cities around the world participating each year.

The idea behind No Pants is simple: Random passengers board a subway car at separate stops in the middle of winter without pants. The participants behave as if they do not know each other, and they all wear winter coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. The only unusual thing is their lack of pants.”

You can RSVP over on Facebook or just show up. The after-party will be held at Bar 13.

Don’t you just love New York? You should move here!

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Top 5 reasons to buy a home during the holidays

Less market activity 

Lots of family, school, and work activities, combined with the weather in many locations, lead to fewer real estate transactions over the holidays. Since fewer people overall are looking to buy houses, you will have less competition for your preferred house -- and this gives you leverage.

Holiday home sellers often have to adjust their price downward or make other concessions if they want to sell. Keep this in mind as you search for homes. Bargains may be available, and listed prices may be more open to negotiation.

Motivated sellers 

People who are selling their homes over the holidays often have great incentive to sell, such as an upcoming job relocation. If a house has already been on the market for some time, that incentive is multiplied.

You may be able to use this urgency to your advantage (assuming you are not in a similarly urgent need to buy). Negotiate fairly but firmly with sellers and you should be able to extract a lower price and/or other concessions like paying part of the closing costs.

Potential tax advantages 

If you itemize your taxes, you can deduct any points you paid upon closing, as well as property taxes and mortgage interest. Whether it is to your advantage to buy before or after year's end depends on factors such as how many other deductions you have this year and expect to have next year.

It is best to consult with a tax professional before purchase. Even though you do not want to make a decision on a home purchase strictly for tax reasons, it could be to your benefit to close before the end of the year.

Better interest rates 

Within the general trend of interest rates, there is often a cyclical trend of lower interest rates during the holidays -- not from the generosity of lenders but due to limited demand forcing greater competition among lenders.

There are plenty of factors that can obscure or swamp this cycle, but in general, you should see preferable interest rates around the holidays compared to the times immediately before or after.

Faster closings 

Generally, all parties involved have incentive to complete transactions toward the end of the year. Lenders want to close their books, real estate agents want to receive their commissions before the year closes, sellers want to move on to their new home and settle in for the holidays - and just like the sellers, you want to settle in as well.

Since all parties are motivated and there are fewer transactions taking place during this time, it should be easier to put everything in place for a smooth and rapid closing.

These factors do not always apply. For example, if you are trying to buy a home in a winter ski resort area or similar high-demand winter destination, these dynamics may be reversed - except for the tax implications. However, for the majority of Americans, the holidays represent an opportunity to buy a home under mostly favorable economic conditions.

This article was originally published on CBS MoneyWatch.

Ready to move into a new house? Call us at 718-852-2352 for a free quote.

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Tips for Moving Over the Holidays

Packing up and moving your home can be stressful any time of the year. But the process is especially overwhelming if you’re planning to relocate in December or January.

Try these tips to rejoice in the holiday spirit while managing to pack your things and move.

Move right after Christmas

The best way to actually enjoy the holidays despite having to move is to make your moving day after Dec. 25. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a very low-key week — most people take off work and many spend the week with family and friends. So why not move the weekend after Christmas and utilize all of the extra help from family and friends who are sure to be around?

Keeping in the holiday spirit

If you are able to wait until after the holidays to move, then do so. You can make life a lot easier on yourself and your family. A great way to handle the packing process is to decorate for the holidays as you usually do. However, instead of placing your normal, everyday decor in the basement or nearest closet … just pack it up! Aim to pack everything (within reason) but the holiday item so that the only accessories you need to worry about packing after the holidays are the few bins of decorations that you had out.

Prioritizing your packing

Most of the items that you need to move should be packed and ready for your new house, so all that should be left out is your holiday decor (including the Christmas tree).

Next, go to your kitchen and pack everything that you only use on special occasions. (You can borrow items for the holidays from family members and friends.) Then pack up the items in your basement, storage closets and garage — rooms that are not high-traffic areas during the holidays. You can keep the packed boxes in your garage or basement.

In the hallway, living room and dining room, try to keep the curtains, a few family photos and minimal decorations to give your house the warm holiday feeling your family is used to. Even though you’re moving, you don’t want the holidays to get lost in the shuffle.

Moving mid-holiday

For those families that must move right in the middle of the holidays, try leaving your living room or family room decorated, so that it still feels like home. Wait to pack up that room until the day before you move. That way when you arrive in your new house you can immediately put up your Christmas decorations and tree. Even if your house has boxes and is messy and unorganized, unpack your living room and make it warm, inviting and festive.

The holidays are a time for family and friends — make room for them in your life as you prepare to move. Don’t get so lost in the details of your move that you forget what this festive time is all about!

This article was originally published on Angie’s List.

Did you know we move everyday of the year? Call today for your free estimate, 718-852-2352.