Moving
So you want to know how best to move heavy furniture across Freiburg? Well, we are just the people to tell you, having just done it ourselves. Now if you enter our once sparse apartment, you will find a pull out couch (now Mom doesn’t have to sleep on the floor when she visits), a glass kitchen table and four chairs and a bed. Since we’re not wizards, having never received that fateful letter from Hogwarts at age 11, we couldn’t alakazam everything into place. But with a little help from very kind people, a lot of abuse of the public transit system and a whole lot of elbow grease, we managed it.
The first thing to arrive was the kitchen table and chairs. We were at inlingua (the language school where we teach downtown) one day, sorting out some course details and using the internet (still none @ the apartment), when Manny came up with a successful search for second hand goods. One was a used goods store at the end of tram line 5 and the other was an apartment sale and it was just around the corner. We visited the apartment sale first. They had a great mish-mash of stuff for sale from bright red eighties style lounging chairs with matching ottomans to elaborate candelabras and a very nice and ordinary looking round, glass kitchen table and chairs. The table looked promising but the rest, not so much, so we put in an offer and it was ours...ours but still across town. We started off with the chairs. They are metal framed and their seats and backs are covered with a black/tan leather substitute (two are black and two are tan). They’re comfy and not too heavy but just a little cumbersome. After walking to the closest transit stop, we got them home without too much difficulty on the tram. Did I mention there are about 80 steps between the front door of our apartment building and our place?
We didn’t head back straight away for the table. Instead we checked out this thrift shop we happened to see as we whizzed by on the tram. It’s very close to our building and there we were able to pick up a (working!) toaster for 4 euros. That item, at least, was very easy to get home.
So we headed out on the #5 to the used goods store. If you wanted your guests to swear they’d been transported back to the 70’s, you need only shop there for all you household goods. We saw a spin dial telephone that was...upholstered?! Aside from the telephone...which I almost had to get, we spotted this great set of plates, bowls, egg cups (YAY!) and mugs that the staff must’ve just be setting out on display. Most of it was still packed snugly in a box which was doubly perfect. It’s such a cute set. It’s a pottery style with trees on it and it matches. We even got them to throw in a casserole dish on the side.
Once we got that back to our apartment on the tram, we faced up to the fact that we still had to get the table. So Manny grabbed his big, new, orange backpack for the table legs and we headed out. The table selling people very kindly wrapped the table top, sans legs, in a couple old sheets and mummified it in packing tape. This was, by far, the hardest thing to get home. It was a bit of a walk to the transit stop and we got a lot of funny looks. And some helpful hints like “roll it” (only in German...) which would have worked if the table top wasn’t glass and the streets weren’t so cobbley. It was too much for one person to carry alone so I volunteered to be the one to walk backwards because both people walking sideways wasn’t working. We did get it onto the tram and then to our place and then all the way up 80 steps to our apartment where we released it from its mummification.
We waited a couple of days before attempting any other large manoeuvres. Then, on Saturday, it was off to Ikea. Fun fact, Manny has only been to Ikea twice, ever. And both times were in Germany. I find Ikea can be quite overwhelming and exhausting, if very rewarding. So we tried to remain very focused on our list and bypass all the “OOOoooh, look at that!” stuff. A nice salesman helped us in the bed section and we put together a fairly inexpensive yet comfortable and functional bed set. Then we saw another frame that was cheaper by 60 euros! So a now slightly disgruntled salesman changed our order for us. On the way to the warehouse to select our unassembled bed, we found 2 frying pans, 1 pot, 2 blankets, 1 set of sheets and 2 pillows. Not a bad haul, all things considered. We decided the best way to get this all home was on the bus. A natural assumption, I think you’ll agree. The bus stop is so close to Ikea we just rolled our trolley right on out to it. We returned the trolley (come on, we’re not animals!) and got on the bus. Funny stares aside, it was a pleasant journey and a nice gentleman helped us unload our goods at our stop. I waited at the bus stop while Manny carried the mattress home and unloaded his backpack. Together we managed to get the frame, lattice mattress support and assorted other items home without a glitch.
You’d think that’d be enough for one day, but it wasn’t. We also had agreed to check out a pull out couch we’d seen listed on the communal posting board at the university. We’d even managed to negotiate delivery for a small additional fee. Armed with the measurements of our narrow, staircase hallway entryway, Manny set off to size up the couch. (I was prepping our place for our apartment’s first company). The size jived so Thomas (previous couch owner) and Manny (new couch owner) tried to fit it in the car...it didn’t fit. No problem, the neighbour lent them a veeeery small hand cart. It was a children’s wagon really, but it worked, and Manny and Thomas set out, on foot, for a one hour hike to our apartment where they were photographed by our neighbours. I didn’t think the small delivery fee really covered foot treks hauling a couch so I got the boys some beer and after the couch was comfortably snuggled into our apartment (it fit up the stairs!!), we had Thomas, his wife, Eva, and their baby, Emma, over for a beer. We only gave Emma a little, tiny bit. We got a new couch, made 3 new friends and garnered an invite to dinner.
Jess and Jonas arrived a short time after and we wined and dined them to the point where we convinced them to help us assemble our bed! Coincidentally, the frame we got was the same one they had invested in and so they had previous experience.
Thank you to all those wonderful people out there who know how hard moving can be. And thank our lucky stars for a tolerant public transit authority.
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