Thursday
Four days before the wedding Jen got a call from the Wadsworth. The wedding planned for the night before ours had purchased a pergola for use.
Pergola: noun An archway in a garden or park consisting of a framework covered with trained climbing or trailing plants.
As the structure would take some time to deconstruct, and they really didn’t want to have to take it apart Sunday morning, they asked us if we’d like to use it. It was a good looking structure.
Jen and I agreed that it’d be nice to use, though the offer came with a warning. The structure was setup about 100 feet further away from the mansion than we wanted. That means we’d have to move it.
Saturday
Once the pergola was set up by the preceding wedding, Pat, T, and I went to the mansion to check out the structure and see how hard it would be to move. That pergola? 12 feet tall, ~8feet long. i.e. HUGE. I admitted that this would be too challenging to move, but Theresa, perhaps enamored by its beauty, encouraged us to reconsider. After a brief discussion, we agreed to give it a go.
I didn’t want to take any chances, so I asked that our Pergola team report to the Mansion at 9am on the day of the wedding.
The Pergola Team:
Mike D
Steve
Tree
Pat
Dad D
Jay
Sunday
Sunday morning, after an episode of star trek, I loaded up the car with some tools. Steve stopped by and we headed to the mansion. T brought coffee and doughnuts.
First task: remove the ornamentation
Second task: we had no idea.
We had two guesses for moving this thing. The columns were hollow, so the first idea was to lift the columns up and carry the structure as a whole. This didn’t work as there were significant stakes in the ground beneath the columns.
Our second idea was to lift the top structure off the columns, and then move the columns individually. We had four ladders, and at their highest A frame height we were able to just barely lift the structure. The problem here was that we were extremely unstable on the ladders. There was high risk for disfigurement.
We struggled with this for about an hour before Dad D recommended we remove the top cross members to lighten the burden. The annoying part, and why we didn’t try this out of the gate, was that the pieces were secured with torx head screws and we didn’t have the right tools.
After discussion, we agreed with Dad D and Steve and I went off to Home Depot to buy the a set of Torx head screw drivers. This was much quicker than driving home.
Once we’d decided on this method, the deconstruction went pretty quick.
Please note the extremely large stakes that were used to secure the pergola columns.
Repositioning and Rebuilding begins
Yes, once we figured out what to do it was a quick process but with so many failed attempts, the process ended up taking 4 hours for 6 people. What an endeavor!
We were extremely glad to have taken on the task. The Pergola was a beautiful structure and in retrospect was a very fun distraction from pre-wedding stresses.