Calling all sofa and moving experts

I read somewhere that on the scale of the most stressful incidents of life, a family Christmas rated between moving house and a contested divorce. But I can’t remember which came first.

My parents tell the story of a friend they knew in law school who after graduation traveled around the world, acquiring all sorts of irrreplaceable knick-knacks and other objects from far-flung places. He then returned to Cambridge to live for some period of time before moving. The night before his move, he packed up all his worldly possessions into a car (or maybe truck?)–the objects d’art from around the world as well as his everyday items. Of course, the car was stolen during the night.

For my entire childhood they told me this story, and I have therefore become terrified of packing up the truck/car the night before. I simply won’t do it.

Am I the only one who immediately thought of “Dirk Gently”?

Having lived in a succession of old apartments and houses in Chicago, once with my queen-sized bed stacked up in the living room for two years cause I couldn’t get it up the stairs, I can report this: true professional movers can get things places you can’t even begin to think about. In fact, when we moved from the bed-in-the-living room place I was forced to hire pros for the first time (due to aging back syndrome), and they got that bed up a stairway _smaller_ than the one I couldn’t do. When I asked how they just laughed at me ;-(

Of course, it is a question of how much you are willing to pay. Good professional movers don’t come cheap, even by the hour. And creative solutions might involved disassembling the window and hiring a lift truck to get it up there, for example. But if it is important to you, bite the bullet and call a place that offers regular, antique, and piano moving services. They will have someone who can do it.

Cranky

> According to Poor Richard, “Three removes is as
> bad as a fire.”

Funny, I have always heard that spoken “as GOOD as a fire”!

Cranky

Now that the sofa is in place, get a copy of “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” You may not like the book in its entirety, but the first chapter will sound familiar.

Do any of em do dorms? (I hate dorm life…)

You have to be very careful about movers– it’s just one of those businesses that lends itself to scammers (from overcharging, to theft, to plain incompetence). But a good mover is worth his weight in gold.

My wife and I moved into a two story condo after law school, and for the life of us we could not get our queen-sized boxsprings up the metal spiral staircase to the second floor bedrooms. We tried it a million different ways with as many as half a dozen people helping us, and even considered taking the upstairs windows out of their frames and hoisting the boxsprings up on a rope, but we finally ended up sawing the boxspring in half and screwing and gluing it all back together upstairs (we were broke and could not afford a new bed). Weeks later, talking to other people who lived in the complex, I sheepishly admitted what we had done, assuming someone was going to explain the trick to us and make us feel foolish for taking a saw to the boxsprings– but no. Turns out that it was quite impossible to get a queen-sized box springs up those stairs (all the condos had the same setup)– you could fit a smaller bed up there, and you could fit a king (because the boxsprings for a king comes in two pieces already), but not a queen. One guy had left his queen-sized bed in the downstairs living room for two years before finally getting rid of it. It was just one of those things. Needless to say, when we moved out I sawed the bed to pieces and left it in the alley.