Moving is heinous.
Real estate people (and I’m a real estate person) never tell you that. We focus on all the happy parts of the move — meeting the new neighbors and planting a new tree and setting up the area in the pantry where you’re going to put “junior’s growth chart.” We don’t talk much about the actual moving date itself.
I guess it’s like having a kid. When people picture having a kid, they picture all the fun stuff: little league games, story time, “junior’s growth chart,” etc. We don’t focus on the actual birth date itself, with the pain and the screaming and the gore and something called a placentia that I understand is extremely unpleasant (I should point out that, yes, I am as yet childless).
So moving is like having a child: lots of fun once that actual event (i.e., the move, or the birth) is actually over. But the move itself is no fun.
The worst part of our move is that we did it in two parts. We moved out of our place in the city a month ago, going through a horrible day (days, really) of packing and packing and packing and cleaning and watching guys struggle with our furniture while they went up and down the stairs (okay, that last part was probably tougher for them than for me). And then we had the joy of spending three hours trying to get one couch down the stairs, convinced that it HAD to be able to get down if it got up, and then finally taking parts of it off to get it to fit, all the time wondering if we could amend our sales contract to include the couch in the sale, maybe affixing it to the wall or something so we could pretend it’s a fixture.
So now we did the move in, and it was just as horrible. To get the day started great, we overslept, and the movers showed up at my parent’s place to pick up the stuff we’d stored there (including ourselves). So what was going to be a stressful day started even more stressfully, without time for a shower or breakfast and a hurried stuffing of our everyday things into suitcases so we could move them into the new place.
At least this time, we had an elevator. After 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to cover the elevator with the blankets that we luckily found in a utility closet, we started the move.
And, again, the couch. I’m not sure why anyone (in this case Henredon) sells couches that can neither get down apartment stairs or fit in apartment building elevators. The couch should be specially marked in the catalog with some sort of description like “Only buy this couch if you live on a single-story dwelling with a big door.” Another two hours trying to get the couch up the elevator or, in a potential solution that made the movers none too thrilled, up eight flights of stairs. It didn’t matter. The couch couldn’t fit in the elevator OR the stairs.
So we figured that maybe this was the end of the road for this couch, that even if we somehow got it out we’d just have the prospective horror of dealing with this stupid freaking couch 10 years from now when we moved out of this building. But a quick internet search found a service that actually comes to your home and takes apart your furniture, something we probably should have discovered years ago. It was great. Guy came over, I gave him an astounding wad of cash, and he took apart the couch so we could get it in the elevator. It was a little disconcerting watching him pull apart the couch, it felt a little like he was pulling apart a person. I was flashing to the flying monkeys tearing apart Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.
So now we still have this couch, even though I try to sit in it a little gingerly so as not to have it collapse underneath me.
