Last week I moved to the apartment Ian and I will share in…65 days.

Moving is odd, because afterward I feel exhausted and stressed and just want to go home and veg on my own couch. And I technically can, but then I realize that my house doesn’t feel like home, and I don’t know where anything is, and there is nowhere in the whole world I can go right now that feels quite homey. Of course, the feeling wears off and after a while my new place will feel like coming home, but for the first few weeks, when I am the most tired from my move, it just feels a little … off. I come in my front door and it doesn’t smell right. A soaking thunderstorm comes up and I have no idea where my umbrella is. Even the sleep is different, with different sounds and lighting and bathroom pathways, and nothing feels quite like home. 

Every morning when I wake up and get ready for work, I have to think through my new commute, and think about what time I need to leave, and look at my maps to remember which way to turn out of my front door, because Queens always feels backwards to me for some reason and I am as directionally challenged here as a New Yorker dropped in Wisconsin without a phone. And every night when I go to bed, I have to think through my alarms – “Is this enough time to get ready and get to work on time?” Nothing feels like routine. 

It’s been a week now since I moved from the bottom of Brooklyn to the middle of Queens, and I am happy to report that basically all my boxes are unpacked, except for my books which are waiting on me to purchase a bookshelf, and I am slowly getting accustomed to the quirks of this new place, such as my floors being less creaky and my stairs narrower. Speaking of narrow stairs – would you like to hear the tale of my move? 

I had long planned to book professional movers for this day. Moving is a beast anywhere, but it is particularly monstrous in NYC, and since this is my fourth apartment since I’m here, I was just over it. So I worked movers into my careful budget, and booked a date with Piece of Cake – the hot pink trucks you see all over the city. I packed for what felt like forty days and forty nights, and carefully counted the number of boxes I would need, so I could plan correctly and the movers wouldn’t charge me more when they arrived. I took the day off work, since I was required by my new building to move on a weekday between 9-4, and Ian took a day off, and my sisters put their heads together and bought a flight up from North Carolina for that one day, like the little angels they are. 

The movers were set to arrive between 9-11am, so my sisters and I got bagels before 9, in case the movers arrived early, and then proceeded to sit, and sit, and sit, with nary a peep from the movers. Finally 11:00 came, and I decided to call the company and see what their ETA was. “Let me look up your account”, said the nice customer service guy, and while he did so, I looked again at one of my 20 emails they had sent me. My heart sank to the tips of my toes. Guys. I had booked the movers for the wrong day, and never in all my back and forth emailing did I catch it. I felt actually sick, like I wanted to throw up. I couldn’t afford to take another day off work, since I have literally one or two sick days left for the rest of the year, and of course Ian would be back at work the next day, and my sisters were flying out the next day. What on earth was I going to do? 

The customer service guy came back on the call, and I proceeded to beg for mercy. “Please, please, is there any way you could send people out today?” I pleaded. “I have to be in by 4pm, and I booked for the wrong day!”

“I’m not sure I can get anyone to finish that early,” he told me, “but I will send someone out to you by 1pm. Just let your new building know you may be finishing a little late.”

The Lord bless that customer service guy. Shortly after noon – about an hour after I had called him in a panic – a sturdy truck rolled up with Three Sturdy Men aboard, ready to haul my stuff to Queens. A picture of efficiency, they emptied that tiny apartment in a trice, with only one pause when the main mover let me know sadly that my couch wouldn’t fit in the elevator. I already knew this, but hoped the couch had shrunk or the elevator had grown since the last time I tried to fit it in there. Of course, magic was not on my side, so I assured the mover that Ian and I would hoist it down the stairs ourselves. Hoist we did, and soon everything was aboard their truck, and Ian’s car was crammed with my houseplants and sisters and baby Lark and ourselves. 

We made it to our new apartment, followed by the hot pink truck and the Three Sturdy Men. They blazed through the boxes and the furniture, reassembling my bed for me, and scurrying up and down my elevator. Then it came to the couch again. “I’m sorry,” the head mover said sadly, “but it won’t fit in the elevator.” What? This elevator was much larger than my previous one, so I was a bit puzzled and went down to see for myself. They angled it in, and sure enough, it stuck. Oh no, what was I going to do? Head Mover told me he thought it would be about $50 per flight of stairs to carry it up for me. Not only was that a lot of taco money, but upon further inspection, it turned out that the couch wouldn’t fit up the stairs either. Noooooooooo. Ian and I ran to the super’s office to ask him if we could leave it in the basement while I tried to figure out what to do with a couch I couldn’t fit anywhere. “Sure,” said the super, “but it really should fit in the elevator. It’s big for that very purpose.” That was my feeling exactly, so we went back to the Three Sturdy Men and asked them if there’s any way they could try again. This time Ian asked them to remove the blankets wrapping it, which gave us maybe an extra inch to work with. Ian himself went into the elevator with the top of the couch, which again, predictably, stuck halfway in. The movers gave me “I told you so” looks. I couldn’t believe my bad luck, and felt like the couch just had to go in, so I gave it a little German shove, and pshhhhht, in it slid, like it was made for it. 

HALLELUJAH. 

And so all my stuff was arranged in my new apartment, and I felt positively weak with relief. Have you ever tried to dispose of a rather expensive and very wide couch in an apartment building where there’s no storage to put it into? Have you ever booked movers for the wrong day, and felt absolutely sick on your stomach when you realized it? 

The head mover apologized multiple times to me for the couch fiasco. He told me he had been asked to give things a good shove before, and then been held liable for the damage when things broke. Of course, I understood his side entirely, and gave him a good tip for the Three Sturdy Men, out of sheer relief that everything had worked out so well in the end. 

We unpacked a little, then I took my sisters and Ian to downtown Flushing, now conveniently close by again, for some proper Chinese food in the basement of the New World Mall, and a dessert of brown sugar boba at Xing Fu Tang. The mall is the kind of place where you can get stir fried pig ear and tripe and soup dumplings and hand pulled noodles and a hundred other things you cannot even pronounce, and most everything is quite delicious. I am very glad to be living within reach of it again. 

That night we unpacked till our legs gave out, then crashed into bed. The next morning, I took my sisters to the pretty part of my new neighborhood for more bagels and some sightseeing, before I left them to explore while I went back to work. But the little sisters, rather than exploring, went back to my apartment and broke down boxes and washed dishes and arranged flowers on the table and generally made the place into such a spic and span home before they dashed off to the airport, that I was almost moved to tears when I arrived back from work that night, expecting chaos instead of this peaceful place. Moral of the story: get yourself two sisters like mine. 

As I mentioned, I am now back in Queens, in fact, I’m only a few train stops away from where I spent my first three years in NYC. I loved Brooklyn (Ok, I absolutely loved Bay Ridge, not my disastrous Crown Heights apartment), but I really did miss Queens too. I missed the huge variety of authentic world-wide cuisine available, while still living close to Costco and Aldi and Target. I missed being a hop and a skip from LaGuardia airport. Although I enjoyed my shorter commute to work, I did miss traveling through the city every day, because there’s nothing more fun than just hopping off the train on a fall evening to do a little walking in between skyscrapers with a cozy autumnal coffee before you head the rest of the way home. Living and working in Brooklyn as I did, going into Manhattan was an event, rather than just a pop off the train. 

This move has been quite stressful, because there was the whole pressure of finding a place for Ian and I to live with our wedding steadily coming closer and closer. Then there was the MONTH it took the board to review and approve our application, and a nerve-wracking zoom interview with the board members. But it’s over, thank the Lord, and now I can focus all my energy on making it to October 26, and then sleeping that whole day. 

I would now like very much to not move out of this apartment for 20 years. I’m sure Ian and I can fit all thirteen of our children in the Very Tiny second bedroom, no problem. What else are bunk beds for? And I am now in Forest Hills, a neighborhood I had admired before I ever even moved to NYC, so that’s kinda cool. To be clear, I am not in the bougie part of the neighborhood (a fact I always feel compelled to point out to those who know Forest Hills), but on evenings when I want a long walk, I can meander down to the quiet streets lined with European-looking mansions and Narnia-lanterns spilling soft yellow light over everything, and on Saturdays I can walk to Austin Street for ramen or Korean fried chicken or a precious china teapot full of rose tea at Prince Tea House. 

May your next move be far easier than mine ever seem to be, and may you always be able to find your umbrellas. Thanks for reading.

You Might Also Enjoy:

Moving Around New York City

Little Letters, Moving Edition