What are you supposed to do when you need to move flat during a pandemic?

After the chaos of finding a new apartment, Holly Baxter must endure moving house during a New York lockdown – and to make matters worse the two previous tenants in her new home aren’t keen on leaving

Moving flat in New York is a grind at the best of times (Getty)

Quarantine in New York grinds on – today my fiance and I walked round the room six times to try and get 250 steps in – and it has its moments. Yesterday, I got emotional about the beauty of a blossom tree planted in the garden of the apartment block next to ours. Is this evidence that I have returned to living life in the slow lane and come to appreciate the beauty of the world around me during lockdown, or evidence that I am rapidly losing my mind? It’s impossible to know right now, though I presume the answer will eventually become obvious.

The one thing we still have to go ahead with, isolation or no, is our apartment move. We spent weeks bidding for flats on the over-saturated New York market a month ago and managed to secure a small studio in an enviable part of Brooklyn. On 1 April, come rain or shine (or, indeed, global pandemic), we have to pack our stuff into boxes and leave our current place for pastures new.

Our realtor loudly informed the two men that we were the new tenants; the men loudly replied in Mandarin, which none of us are particularly proficient in

Doing so in the current climate has its issues. A few days ago, Governor Cuomo of New York announced that there would be a temporary ban on evictions, alongside a package of other policies intended to benefit residents in the short term. Sounds great on the surface, right? Well, it is – unless you’re moving out of a building that’s due to be knocked down and the tenants in the apartment you’re moving into refuse to move.

The day after Cuomo’s announcement, my fiance and I met up with our estate agent to view the supposedly empty new apartment and measure up to see which furniture we could take along. We nodded our heads awkwardly at each other in the street and the realtor, Elan, offered us some hand sanitiser (the currency of the apocalypse.) We then followed him up the stairs to the new apartment, he opened the door and we walked into… a decidedly non-empty apartment. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this apartment was full to the brim. Blinking back at us as Elan threw open the door were two very confused middle-aged Chinese men in pyjamas, one of whom was standing up eating noodles and the other of whom was sat on a low ottoman, feeding almonds to a barking Corgi. It was an arresting scene.

Chaos then ensued. Elan loudly informed the two men that we were the new tenants; the men loudly replied in Mandarin, which none of us are particularly proficient in. The Corgi continued to bark. The apartment had a conspicuous absence of moving boxes. It was, instead, filled wall-to-wall with the furniture of two people living separate lives: four wardrobes, two double beds, two separate desks with computers, and so on. Needless to say, there was no room for our measuring tape. We took a quick, polite look and tried to estimate in our minds which furniture we might be able to bring before leaving.

Our days since then have been spent chasing up with the estate agents. Having lost most of their business themselves since lockdown, they too are not very happy about the prospect of the tenants in the new place preventing our move from going ahead. We have been told by them, optimistically, to book in our movers, and that the men are simply delayed by a few days because their own new apartment has delayed renovations due to coronavirus layoffs in the construction industry.

I can’t imagine Governor Cuomo foresaw this sort of problem when he signed into law a temporary effort to keep people from being kicked out their homes – but when you’re the last two left in a condemned multi-room apartment, your flatmates have moved out and you wouldn’t be able to afford to pay an extra month where you are, the house of cards does start to fall apart. Hopefully the middle-aged men and their Corgi get a newly renovated – and ideally larger – apartment sorted by the end of the week. We’ll be keeping our fingers and toes crossed behind our biohazard gear.