In the past, it has generally been Bean and myself that move me. This time around, I thought it would be good to call in my "sorry-I-almost-killed-you-this-summer" favor from Mark and get him to help us, which (a) turned out to be a really good idea; and, (b) now, because of the intensity of the move, means that I owe him.
My old house, which was amazing for a number of reasons, had a very difficult entranceway, moving-wise (see previous posts re our time-bomb of a gas oven). The hallway from the front door was narrow, and to even get to the staircase to our place you had to make a 90 degree turn and go through a doorway. This means that moving couches is an experiment in spatial awareness and your ability to suspend reality. It also means that moving my queen-sized boxspring is an exercise in futility.
When I moved into the apartment, I tried moving the boxspring up using the stairs and couldn't even make it through the doorway. Luckily for me, at the time there was no main floor tenant so I just walked it through the mainfloor apartment into the backyard, where I tied it up with rope and raised it up to the balcony. Once it was up there, I simply hoisted it over the railing and walked it through the bathroom into my bedroom. Easy.
Before leaving for Montreal this weekend, I knocked on the downstairs tenants door a bunch of times to ask them if I could walk my boxspring through their apartment and they never opened the door. At points I could hear them talking inside and they didn't open it . It was infuriating. At any rate, the main-floor-apartment-dependent plan was not an option.
On the morning of the move, we moved both couches and my mattress easily(ish) before turning our minds to the boxspring. We each made a small presentation on our individual ideas for how to get the boxspring down the stairs, and people asked questions.
We decided to try all three ideas.
None of them worked.
We then went out onto the balcony and took a look at the backyard. This is what we saw:
For those of you who don't read paint-toons very well, the bottom line is that the backyard is totally landlocked save for one point three backyards to the left, where it is possible to hop a fence and get into an alley.
Bean and I ran around the block, through the alley, and hopped a couple of fences to get into my backyard. Mark, meanwhile, retrieved the boxspring, carried it out onto the balcony, climbed over the railing onto the roof, then pulled the boxspring over and passed it off the roof down to us in the backyard. We then hopped all the fences back to the backyard with the alley portal, passing the boxspring over each fence.
When we had hopped the fences to get to the backyard we were running and not paying much attention, and so we failed to register this key detail regarding the final backyard on our way in:
Yes, its true. For some inexplicable (likely gardening-related) reason, this neighbor had clotheslines strung widthwise the entire length of the backyard, about waist-height, at 2-3 feet intervals, so Bean and I had to scurry underneath them with the boxspring, then toss it over the last fence and carry it through the alley and back around the block to get it into the truck.