Mind Over Matter: Moving Antique Radiators

When my wife and I purchased our home we removed all the radiators to refinish the hardwood floors.  Since they were extremely heavy, I paid a friend of mine to move them. He was 6' 10" and solid muscle.  Well he left town around the time we got our floors finished and left it up to me to put the radiators back.  I got all of them put back except for one....the biggest one.  That was four years ago.

Well today, I decided I that I had had enough of staring at that radiator on my back porch.  I put together a plan to move this monster.  The radiator is solid steel and likely weighs 1000-1500 pounds.  Not an easy chore...and there were safety concerns as well.

Here is a photo of the radiator before we removed it.  Its the one next to the fireplace.

We had three clawfoot tubs sitting in my back yard that I had collected of the past few years and in order to move them, I constructed some big piano dollies.  I put those dollies to work for this move. 

I rocked the radiator back and forth and shimmed it up to a hieght that would allow me to scoot the dolly underneath each end.  Once we did that, we started the slow move.  Here is the radiator moving through our kitchen door.

 
We ran into trouble at this point.  It became very obvious that I did not construct the dollies to handle this kind of weight.  It could handle claw foot tubs but not this giant radiator.

The screws in the frame started to rip out and put our move in peril.  We continued to move although very slowly.  Then we realized that the casters on the dolly were putting indentations in our wood floor.  AAAH!

We layed blankets down to soften the blow that the casters were making and that seemed to help alot. 

Eventually, we got the radiator into final position for de-shimming and lowering to the floor.

Getting the radiator into place was quite difficult.  The plumbers that installed this system 101 years ago were excellent craftsman.  The space between the pipe fittings in the floor and the fittings on the radiator had a gap of less than 1/16".  It was a very tight fit that took a lot of levers to put everything in place.  It was very awkward trying to manuver that much weight around in such a precise way. 

The move from the back porch to this spot took just over 90 minutes.  It was a pretty big adventure.  Had the thing tipped over it would crushed anyone in its way.  It would have destroyed our floor wherever it landed as well.  By taking it slow we survived.  Now on to another project in the house...