As my last photo of our apartment’s common space showed, for a while my roommates and I didn’t have much furniture in the living room. After I took that shot, we only added a desk and a chair. But last week the mom of one of my roommates said she would give us a sofa-and-two-chair living room set.

The chairs were easy to move in last week. The sofa arrived a few days ago, but it didn’t fit in the elevator. And I guess taking it up the stairs was out of the question. So the strategy devised (by whom was unclear to me) seemed insane: It would be brought in through the window (by whom was unclear to me).

Never mind that the only panes of the window that open are about six inches wide. I got home from class about this morning to see my roommate’s sister, who was waiting for the moving men to start moving the sofa through the window.

What?

Well, it makes sense, if you’re going to make it make sense. First you remove the big window pane, which is about 8 feet by 4 feet. Then you tie rope to the sofa and haul it up the side of the building, up seven stories. Then you pull it in the window. You do this, of course, without scaffolding or spotters or anything below.

Anyway, that’s how you get a sofa into a seventh-floor apartment when the building’s facilities can’t help you. Here‘s an album of photos from the event. It was fun.