No, not me: just everybody in Montreal, apparently. So I attach this article for your entertainment.
When I was in Montreal a few years ago (staying in residential neighborhood), one of my first thoughts was “How do these people get large items such as refrigerators in and out of their homes with no elevators or even internal non-spiral stairways?”
The answer apparently is “With a lot of difficulty.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
I know for a fact that pianos go in and out through windows. From around 1860 to 1920 anybody who was anybody had a piano in their apartment. All of those apartment buildings were made so that you could get a grand piano or upright piano in through the window.
In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency the central character has a sofa stuck on his staircase,
These staircases are quite clear.
I don’t get it.
I’d heard that too, Mark. Actually, I asked sombody when I was there.
What I want to know is, how often did those pianos fall down on somebody’s head? If cartoons are any indication, there isn’t a single piano that DOESN’T crash down on somebody’s head.
Sometimes they just hang there ominously…
Bill – I am guessing that pianos fell a lot less often in real life than they did in movies.
With what we have been going through the past week – I just hope the first refrigerator works right after they get it into the apartment. (I have traced back and found out that our odd luck in the past several months – and constant having to redo things- plus the attacks of “the borrowers” and things disappearing, seems to have started just after Yom Kippur. I guess we were not written into the book of life for a good year. I hope it changes this fall.
@ Meryl A – It is not a good idea to turn a refrigerator on right after it has been moved. Most manuals recommend waiting at least several hours (some even say 24 hours), so that any bubbles in the coolant can percolate back up where they belong. Restarting it too soon risks damage to the compressor.
@Kilby, you just gave me my Fun Fact for the day! I did not know you had to settle a moved refrigerator. Not that I didn’t believe you (he says politely), but even GE appliances backs you up! From
https://products.geappliances.com/appliance/gea-support-search-content?contentId=16603 :
After transporting:
If it has been necessary to transport the refrigerator on its side (ex. Top Freezer and SxS models), it should stand upright for an equal amount of time as it was on its side before plugging it in. If it was on its side for more than a day, leave standing for 24 hours before running.
If laying on its side just briefly to service, clean or adjust, just a few minutes of stand time will be enough.
I don’t know about getting a large sofa in there, but getting it out sliding down those rails would be a BLAST!
I sat next to a guy on a plane once who made a living disassembling and reassembling furniture in Manhattan so folks could get it in and out of apartments. Talk about specialization!
Isn’t NYC also one of the places where 1 July (or at least first of the month) is moving day?
When I first moved to Boston I got an apartment on the third floor and hired a mover with a crane to move my 6 foot grand piano. The day before he arrived I went out and bought a mattress and box spring. The mattress could be bent enough to get up the stairs and around the corners. The box spring could not so I left it on the staircase and next day told the mover “I have one more thing for you to rig through the window.”
My apartment was in a brick building constructed sometime around 1850. The window looked like any ordinary window, and like any ordinary window, was a really big hole when you took it all apart. The mover took it all apart in about two minutes and put it all back together in about two minutes.
Oh, and a grand piano being lifted on a crane doesn’t look like a grand piano being lifted on a crane. It looks like a vaguely-piano-shaped padded mattress 7 feet by 5 feet by 1 foot.
I’d be more worried about how I was going to get through a Montreal winter without taking a fall and breaking every bone in my body.
Chak: Nah, there’s enough snow on the ground that you fall soft. It’s places further south that are more dangerous: freeze/thaw/freeze/thaw leads to lots more ice. And no nice snowpack to cushion the blow.
I grew up in Ontario, have lived south of the Manson-Nixon line (as some wag called it) for 30+ years, and I’ll take an honest January in Ontario any day over this crap!
“I’d be more worried about how I was going to get through a Montreal winter without taking a fall and breaking every bone in my body.”
I had the same thought, Chak.
Additionally, the house we were staying it had a flight of stairs in front which, while not spiral, were insanely narrow (front-to-back narrow, I mean). The same principle as the spirals, I guess: they need to get you up a level while using up very little space.
Carrying luggage up there might have been scarier than using a spiral staircase: there was just noplace to securely set down your foot.
What do older people do? And do Montrealers let their children walk downstairs by themselves?
I thought this existed only in medieval castles…
Kilby – Having now had two refrigerators delivered in the past 10 days, the instructions say that they should be turned on when installed set on the middle of the temperature range. They should not then have the door opened nor anything put in them for 24 hours.
Where does one put the stuff from the last fridge while waiting the 24 hours? We charge the RV batteries by plugging it in so we turned on the RV fridge also. The night before we were to go away, we unplugged it to save time in the am. It had kept the fridge going, but did not charge the batteries – so not a good plan if we have to do this again.
Hopefully this one will work right. They work differently now – I used to have our old set so that it stayed with 1 degree +/- of 38 on a general basis – 2 +/- at most. The new ones vary all over – so far from 62 to 43 with the idea of keeping an average temperature of 37 (I can live with same if it is actually kept at same). The range for a refrigerator’s temperature is 34-44 – per the manufacturer. For food it should be under 40, for Robert’s insulin 36 or over. (All temps Fahrenheit)