Welcome to New York, where moving flat is more exhausting than dating

A space the size of a small corridor? Check. Questionable furniture in lieu of a bed? A mountain of fees? Check. Holly Baxter is finding that house hunting in the Big Apple is nothing short of arduous

Gaslighting and intrusive questions are also all part of the moving process (Getty)

Moving house in New York is not like moving house in London. For one thing, you acquire most of your furniture from someone else’s stoop while walking down a side street on a Sunday afternoon and following a handmade sign. For another, you start accepting that places you would previously have described as small corridors now count as entire apartments.

This is not necessarily new territory for me. I began my media career in London living in my friend’s airing cupboard, curled up around the boiler with my spare clothes attached to a single coat-hanger suspended from the ceiling. It didn’t feel like that much of a hardship at the time, although now I’m in my thirties, I’ve developed a niche, over-privileged desire for a mattress; to be completely honest, my expectations in a home might actually extend so far as to an entire bed. I am not, however, too good for a studio flat where you can lean over and cook a fried egg on the stove from the bed. When you live in New York, your priorities shift a little.

I don’t know when I realised that my fiance and I had gone full method acting on moving-related insanity, but I do know there was a point last week when we seriously considered getting bunk beds. “Even for you guys, this is getting weird,” said our current roommate through the wall – which was ironic considering he’s a man in his mid-thirties who lives in a walk-in wardrobe, but I took his point.

The madness is encouraged by the questions you’re asked by estate agents when you turn up to viewings. “Do you really need to measure things?” asked one, when we took out some tape to try and work out if our existing furniture would fit in the flat he was showing us. Gaslighting you into believing you’re being unreasonable for relying on objective measurements of physical space is par for the course.

“Can you describe the cat?” asked another, when we said we had a pet that needed to move in with us. You never imagine you’ll be sat in a coffee shop poring over how to accurately describe a cat next time you’re asked – “Say he’s old so they don’t think he’s a scratching kitten! But wait, not so old that they think he might throw up on the carpets!”, “Don’t mention he’s a long-hair – we don’t want to be edged out by any short-hair owners who can promise less mess”, “For God’s sake don’t mention he’s black. Black cats are bad luck in America” – but it happens.

Now I’m in my thirties, I’ve developed a niche, over-privileged desire for a mattress

Nor do you imagine you’re the kind of people who would strategise before an open house event, agreeing that one of you will loudly talk about the noise from the main road and the lack of views while the other will seem annoyed about the lack of laundry facilities in the building in order to put the other prospective tenants off. But you learn a lot about yourself when you start renting in areas overlooking the East River.

Once you’ve found an apartment you love and put down the application fee, the broker’s fee, the miscellaneous Venmo fee, the “good faith” fee, and any other fee your particular real estate agent has decided applies, you get sent the tranche of emails asking for various intrusive details about your life. How much is in your bank account right now? Why did you recently withdraw everything you had in your savings account? (“Because we’re paying for a wedding,” we said in our most wholesome voices, having already coordinated our clothes that morning and agreed to hold hands throughout the viewing. In reality, we spent the dosh on a holiday, but nobody needed to know that.)

By the time we finished off a weekend of viewings, prospective tenancy forms and phone calls designed to make us sound very-keen-but-not-in-a-troublesome-or-desperate-way-please-thank-you-call-us, we were both exhausted. “It’s worse than dating,” we both agreed, collapsing onto our cat fur-infested sofa with a pizza box and a pile of junk food.

At least we don’t have to pretend to be respectable to each other: for that respite, at the very least, I am glad.