Fred with a bag full of lamp near their bike.

Moving a floor lamp… with a bicycle??

This is part 3 of my unplanned series, moving items that motorists would expect you to need a motor vehicle to move… without one. Part 1 is about a mattress and part 2 is about a bookcase.

We were moving house and getting rid of things, and my friend Fred indicated interest in a floor lamp that had already seen at least 10 years of use, which was great, one less thing to send with the junk truck.

They came over on a lightly snowing beautiful 25°F early-February afternoon and we took stock of the situation. Fred had a bike and a small drawstring backpack. The floor lamp was about 6 feet tall. I was momentarily daunted.

floor lamp with water bottle for scale. It's a tasteful black with gold accents.
The lamp, staged for maximum desirability.

The first solution I had of bungee cording it to the bike wouldn’t work because there was a big top and a flared base of the lamp, so those would both be interfering with bike operation.

Fred cracked it: unscrew the segments of the lamp from each other! The lamp’s cord couldn’t be pulled through, but we were able to unscrew the lamp segments far enough to be about forearm-length sizes with the cord snaking through them and the whole thing fit in to the drawstring bag!

They handed me back the light bulb as they were pretty sure it would break in transit, plus they had light bulbs at home anyway.

Fred, dressed for the weather and standing outside next to their bike, looks super pleased to be standing with a bag full of lamp on their back. A couple of longer lamp poles are sticking out the top of the bag.
Heck yeah!

They biked back home like normal and shortly after enjoyed a newly illuminated corner of their home!

The lamp is in the corner of a room with a bookcase and a little tree in a pot.
Enlightenment, like everything else, is better when shared.
Pine Salica

About Pine Salica

Pine lives in Minneapolis and works in Saint Paul. Pine hasn't owned a car for over a dozen years, and can count on one hand the number of times they've operated one in the last 12 months. Housing is a human right, car storage is not. Member of the Climate Committee.