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Hi.
I've never lived in a apartment, though I do have a home. I've always wondered how to apartment owners manage to shift large furniture into building apartments???
Use the elevator?? Stairs??? I'm sure you can't just fly furniture into an apartment. It seems a lot of work... and if you are to shift a large piece of furniture upstairs, there's a risk of Falling down backwards.
So..how do they do it??
Op is also boggled as to how shopping mall staff get cars into the building.
When I moved things in and out of my 2nd floor apartment, in a small block of seven apartments, we used a trolley to haul the heavy items, or two of us to carry it, depending on how heavy/the size of the item. It was not enjoyable, particularly getting the fridge down 6 half flights.
The high rise apartment building I currently work in moves residents belongings in/out via the elevator. Iirc, it is rated at 20 person max capacity, and they just throw some heavy duty curtains up to protect the interior.
They just get suitably large people to move large stuff. Works like a charm.
I think the basic answer is, "Often, with some difficulty."
I've never lived in an apartment, but I assume that the architects took the need to move large pieces of furniture into account when designing modern, high-rise apartment buildings, so there must be cargo elevators.
I have seen some older British houses that have been converted into flats where the stairs, turns and arrangement of the doors were such that it would be completely impossible to get things like large sofas into the upstairs flats.
My wife is from The Netherlands. One thing that seems very weird to me about Dutch houses is that the internal stairs tend to be very narrow and steep and they often have bends; not quite a spiral staircase, but close to it. That's a traditional space-saving thing, and it makes getting furniture upstairs something between very challenging and impossible.
If you look carefully at the old houses in places like Amsterdam, you'll often see metal beams projecting out from the front of the house up near the peak of the roof. What they used to do was attach a block and tackle to that beam, remove a large window in the upper floors, and then hoist furniture up and swing it in. These days, Dutch moving firms have furniture elevators that raise boxes and furniture from the ground to an apartment's balcony or a large window on the upper floors that swings completely open.