THE MOVE

In early to mid 2020 Freeside moved location from it's original 6000 square ft location at The Metropolitan complex near the West End MARTA stop to it's current location. This was far and away the biggest project Freeside and Freesiders have undertaken in basically ever. We were told by our old landlord that they would not make any annual renewal of our lease in mid-2019, rumor had it they were intending to bulldoze and/or redevelop, and it was decided that Freeside needed to seek greener pastures.

We spent several months coming up with a gameplan for finding a new location, calling any number we could find for new facilities, driving around all over town to try and find a place that would be a good fit and crucially not too much more than we were already paying in rent. After what seemed like endless work trying to find a place, we secured the lease on the same day that city-wide COVID-19 restrictions were enacted for Atlanta.

So with a plague on the rise, Freeside's most ardent members scrambled to rent moving trucks, call in favors, and mostly grunt and sweat their asses off breaking down the shop and moving it into our new building.

The Bridgeport mill, Busy Bee lathe, and heavy welding tables were the first things to move, as they were the largest and hardest to do anything with. We accidentally broke the engine crane trying to get the mill onto it's custom heavy-duty pallet, and we had to borrow the ramp from our new neighbors (aka cut it off of their loading dock and drag it around with pickup trucks and chains and straps)to bring the heavy stuff inside since there was no ramp when we got the lease.

To actually move the massive machines our good old friend and former board member Kali called in her banners and a good-ol-boy with a bobcat skid-steer only known as "Cowboy" showed up and loaded the machines from the old shop to the new one. He did a victory wheelie through the new shop in his bobcat when we finally got the machines inside.