One thing we did not bring to Tucson during our initial move last year was the hot tub. Hot tubs are difficult to move, even the extra-small one we have. Plus, who needs a hot tub in Tucson? Or so we thought.
Turns out it is plenty cold enough in Tucson in the winter for a hot tub! Although it may briefly get very warm in the middle of the afternoon, mornings and evenings are cool, and nights are downright cold. We even got a little bit of snow last year.
All winter last winter, I kept wishing I had a hot tub. We decided to buy one for Christmas this year. We had company coming for much of December – first my brother and his family, and then my kids and their partners. It would be fun to have a hot tub! Plus, John and I have always made good use of our hot tubs – when we have one, we use it nearly every night, all winter long.
In the past when we’ve moved, we’ve left the hot tub for the new owners, rather than trying to move it. Pre-pandemic you could get a little 110V “plug and play” for a modest amount of money at Lowes or Home Depot. Of course the minute you walk into an actual spa store, the dollar signs start skyrocketing. But we’ve been quite happy with our inexpensive little hot tub that we bought from Home Depot for the Albuquerque house. We planned to buy a similar one for Tucson.
Well, not to trivialize the ongoing ravages of the pandemic, but cheap hot tubs is one of the casualties of the new normal. Lowes and Home Depot and the other discount stores no longer seem to carry anything except inflatables. In early November, as soon as I got back from Boise, I started calling spa stores. I had the same question for all of them: what’s the smallest, cheapest hot tub you have in stock that could be delivered before Christmas?
Some of them said none. Others took messages and didn’t call me back. Finally, I found someone willing to sell me a hot tub. The smallest, cheapest he had in stock cost $8,999. OMG! For a hot tub! The cheapest they had! I could practically get a large, in-ground spa professionally installed for that much money. At that point, John decided he would figure out how to get our hot tub moved from Albuquerque.
On his next trip back to Albuquerque for work, he drove the pickup truck out. He hoped he might be able to transport the hot tub on its side in the truck bed. But after he got out there he decided it would be better to rent a trailer. Here he is, backing the trailer into the side driveway.
He drained the hot tub and jacked it up high enough to get some blocks under it and get straps around it.
Then he needed to get it on its side and onto dollies, so he could wheel it through the narrow gate.
He bought an engine hoist to lift the hot tub up on its side. I didn’t know what an engine hoist was. It sounds like a hoist with an engine, right? Turns out an engine hoist doesn’t have an engine; it works manually with a lever and a hydraulic cylinder. It’s a portable shop crane, often called an engine hoist because they are commonly used to lift engines out of vehicles during repair.
John was able to use the hoist to get the hot tub onto its side, on two rolling dollies.
Even on its side, it barely fit through the gate.
Here he is lowering it back down near the trailer.
Next step – get it onto the trailer.
It took until after dark, but he managed to get it on the trailer. He was running out of time because the original plan was to load it the following day and drive to Tucson the day after that. But the weather was turning ugly and we realized he needed to leave a day early. So he loaded it after work and left at dawn the next morning, hoping to beat the weather. I really didn’t want him towing a hot tub in a snow storm.
These are a couple of crazy pictures John sent me – I just looked and looked in confusion. How did he get pictures of himself driving along on the freeway? This is not the sort of blog where we have a photography crew shadowing us, lol!
It turns out he’s parked in a rest area, lol, it had looked to me like he was driving on the freeway.
It got windy, but he made it off the mesas and out of New Mexico before the snow started.
Safely home! That’s a long rig.
We unloaded in the alley, where we have plenty of space and a wide gate to the backyard. Next step – get the hot tub off the trailer and up onto dollies.
It’s not hard to slide the hot tub off the trailer, but we wanted it up on its end, on the dollies.
We were afraid we’d overshoot and flip it while tipping it up, so we used a big trash can to try to block it from flipping too far over. The alley has an enormous trash can that serves several houses. This is probably an unauthorized use of public property.
Unfortunately, the dollies wouldn’t stay put when we tried to tip the hot tub onto them.
I suggested we strap them to the hot tub first, then flip it up.
But then we couldn’t get it to grip and turn onto its end – it would just slide. So I suggested tying the lower wheels of the dollies to cement blocks, leaving the top edge of the dollies free to rotate down as we tipped the hot tub up. John was dubious, but it worked.
Yay, we didn’t need the trash can after all! I’m not sure how we would have explained a smashed trash can to the city. “Uh…we dumped a hot tub on it…we didn’t mean to…”
Now it was just a matter of putting plywood down and rolling it in.
I was worried it would lose balance and we’d dump it in the pool. We made lots of DIY spa-in-pool jokes. You know, those fancy pools that have a built-in hot spa? Yeah.
Meanwhile, Biska was locked inside, running back and forth between the two sliding glass doors. We knew the moment she was released, she’d be jumping all over the hot tub.
We tied it to a post so it wouldn’t fall on anyone while we prepared the spot where it was going.
We have a second section of backyard, separated from the patio/pool area by a brick wall. The hot tub was going in that second section, in the right-hand corner. We had an overgrown tree in the way. We eventually want to take that tree out and replace it with a nicer one, but for now we decided just to trim it back.
There, that’s better.
Next we needed to lay a foundation for the hot tub. Ideally we’d have cement poured, but that’s surprisingly expensive. It’s also hard to schedule anything like that nowadays. So instead, John set some paving bricks into sand himself. We also added some bamboo screening to the existing fence.
Beautiful. Now we could roll the hot tub in. There’s a narrow gate between the house and the wall that separates the two sections of the backyard. So we had another gate to roll through.
Was it going to fit under the newly trimmed tree? Yep, just barely.
At this point you’d think we could just tip it into place, but it is very heavy and we didn’t want to damage it. Everything takes a long time to do right.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to his block and lever system. Whatever. I had faith.
It looks like we’re almost done, but not at all. There’s no electrical outlet in that part of the yard, so John had to install it.
First he installed a new breaker in the panel on the back of the house. Then he ran conduit and installed the electrical circuit where we needed it for the hot tub.
Here’s the trench to bury the conduit where it crosses the pathway at the gate.
The pathway stones are not set in yet. They’re just sitting on top of the dirt and are a bit wobbly. But they are far better than walking on dirt and it’s fine for now. We can always improve the paving later.
There it is, a nice shiny new outlet.
Ta-da!
John got the hot tub up and running before Christmas!
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