A few of you may know that we own an arcade machine. Open Ice hockey, to be specific. We got it for cheap through a local auction about 2 years ago with the intentions of modifying it into a MAME arcade machine. That project has been back-burnered ever since. The hope is that now that we aren’t saving for a house anymore that we can finally put some money into modifying this beast. Anyways, when we first bought it we knew it would be a pain in the ass to move, and it was. When we first brought it to the apartment 2 years ago, we had to force it up a rather steep hill to our patio, then remove the patio doors to fit it into the living room. It was about as much fun getting it back out of the apartment in May. But as bad as it was with the apartment, we were in for a new challenge with the house. We know we have small doorways and were expecting it be tight fit. Here’s how it went…

We started by sliding it from the trailer up the stairs and laying it across the landing for the basement stairs. So far, so good.

Just to show how tight of a fit it was

The arcade machine perched on the landing

The starting point: on the trailer about to go up the stairs

Then we slid it down the stairs just enough to be able to stand it up on end in the entry area. The plan at this point was to rotate it 90 degrees and  slid it through the doorway into the kitchen, move the stove out of the way and just scoot it into the dining room where it would find its new home.

Here it is standing up in the entryway

After it was rotated and starting to go into the kitchen

Here it is almost in the kitchen

This was all too easy though. We failed to measure the distance from the doorway to the kitchen countertop. It was just an inch off of being a big enough gap to slide it through. We tilted, we rotated, we removed parts, we even tried moving it around upside down. It was not going to go nicely into the kitchen. Clearly, it wanted us to suffer. After several hours of trying to come up with any possible way to get it through the kitchen, it was now 1Am. We were tired, frustrated, and ready to find any way to just get it inside without leaving it blocking an entrance.

Here you can see it hitting the counter on one side and failing to clear the doorway

We decided our best, and perhaps only, option was to take it back out the way we came and drag it around the house to the front porch and hopefully in through the front door. This was not by any means an easier plan, just one with more likelihood of success. We made sure to remove the front door before attempting to get it through, just to pad our odds a bit. It was then moved onto some furniture dollies so we could roll it over the threshold of the door and into the living room. I don’t recall exactly what we did to get it in the door, just that we left it barely in the living room and I walked away swearing to burn it someday…

Here it is in its new home, still on the dollies because we didn’t want to deal with it. I still glare at it occasionally as I remember the struggle to get it inside.

Its new home