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Recycled anecdote from an earlier time this was discussed on HN: While a student, I looked after the apartment of a friend of mine, who was overseas. When he mo
by lb1lf 2y ago
Recycled anecdote from an earlier time this was discussed on HN:
While a student, I looked after the apartment of a friend of mine, who was overseas.
When he moved there, we were _just_ able to eke his sofa around the last corner from the stairwell and through the door to his apartment. Just. After much cursing and several failed attempts.
So, what does a good (cough) friend do while the owner is overseas?
Get some hardwood mouldings/trimmings/whatever you call those long, thin pieces of wood typically put where wall transitions to ceiling or floor and nail them to the exterior doorframes, making both door openings perhaps 3/8" or so narrower, paint them in the color of the doorframe, sit back and wait.
Then, years later, as he is about to leave town, moving company comes along and everything runs smoothly until one item remains. The sofa. Obviously, it got in - so it'll (as obviously) come out.
Only it doesn't.
We (everybody except the owner and the moving guys were in on the joke) managed to keep a straight face for several minutes.
The moving guys even laughed as they (eventually) left, mollified by a bottle filled with a Scottish export product which we'd kept on hand to ensure no feelings were hurt afterwards.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoI have made significant life decisions based primarily on not wanting to move a sofa out of a space I moved it into.
- jjice 2y agoI'm the same way. A friend of mine bought a new couch because she wanted a change of pace, so I came over to help her. I have no idea how that couch got in. I ended up literally sawing it in half (it was an old, beat down couch) to be able to remove it. Needless to say, that reinforced by Ikea furniture only mindset until I know I'm not moving for a decade.
- lostlogin 2y agoHave you checked that some arsehole didn’t narrow the doorframe?
- el_benhameen 2y agoSome friends and I resorted to buying an axe and a bottle of whiskey when we couldn’t get a couch out of our college house. Not OSHA approved and not something I’d want my own kids doing, but we had fun.
- cm2187 2y agoAn axe for the sofa or the walls?
- edm0nd 2y agoI too have done this. My wife owned a condo before we got married and they had moved in this huge sofa. After the sofa was moved in, they did a lot of renovations which made it impossible to get out. Ended up using a chainsaw instead of an axe but it got the job done. Wife wasnt happy but I was like there is no other way to get this out of here besides in pieces haha.
- schneems 2y agoWhat ended up happening? How did they get it out? Removed the moulding or something else?
- forgetfreeman 2y agoI used to live in a 2nd story studio apartment. I had a full sized overstuffed leather couch. The front door had it's own tiny stoop up a steep flight of stairs, and the front door opened onto a tiny coat closet that made it functionally impossible to get the couch aligned and out the door when it was time to move out. After a solid half hour of getting my ass kicked into my hatband trying to configure the couch in such a way that it'd go out the front door I said to hell with it, grabbed my harness, some slings, and a climbing rope, rigged the thing on a cowtail and rappelled off the deck with it. To this day I cannot for the life of me remember how in the hell I managed to get that couch into that apartment.
- pests 2y agoSometimes they come apart in ways you wouldn’t expect. I’ve seen them delivered and reassembled on site.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoWhich you necessarily only realise after you’ve struggled, and succeeded, to get it in to the new place. I’ll remember that next time. No you won’t.
- ChoGGi 2y agoIf it's around windows/doors it's casing, if it's going around the floor it's baseboard, if it's around the ceiling it's crown moulding, if it's halfway up the wall it's wainscoting.
- walthamstow 2y agoWow, in the UK we have completely different names for every one of these. Difficult to believe we speak the same language sometimes. Windows is framing, doors is architrave, floors is skirting board, ceiling is coving, halfway up a wall is a dado rail and 3/4s+ up is a picture rail.
- petersumskas 2y agoAustralia is about the same except around the ceiling we call it a cornice.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoSlight correction: Around windows its architraves and reveals. But I’m in Tasmania, some geographic variation in dialect can be expected. Except, I’m from South Australia, so some people around here think I talk posh.
- ChoGGi 2y agoFor me the reveal is the amount of space between the window casing/trim and the frame of the window.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoI tend to agree.
- secondcoming 2y agoCornice is used in the UK too, I've never heard of coving.
- YossarianFrPrez 2y agoAh, thus we have another solution to the case of Dirk Gently's mystery sofa [1]. [1] https://dirkgently.fandom.com/wiki/Sofa_on_the_staircase https://dirkgently.fandom.com/wiki/Sofa_on_the_staircase
- zaphar 2y agoI instantly thought of this when I saw the title.