Again, with no elevator.
I can’t imagine no elevator and walking up with groceries.
That’s the norm in most urban centers in Europe. Houses are older than elevators, there’s no space for a refit, and rebuilding them from scratch is often not feasible due to the time and cost involved.
I didn’t particularly mind it though. Been living anywhere from 2nd to 5th floor without one, and it’s perfectly fine.
We also don’t buy truckloads of groceries as it works in the US apparently, but pick up stuff we need for the evening or next day on the way back from work, and that’s that. I hardly ever broke a sweat from shopping.
So it would only have been aninconvenience once every 2 weeks? Or you could have adjusted your grocery shopping to your situation…or gotten a wheeled cart…or any number of things.
I’ve lived in multiple 3rd floor walk-ups and I loved it (with a dog that had to go out regularly). If you have a physical limitation that prevents doing stairs it would be a nightmare and moving in and out isn’t great. Otherwise it’s really not bad, a tiny bit of exercise isn’t going to hurt an otherwise healthy adult.
Honestly, doing laundry in the basement when I lived on the 3rd floor was the most annoying part of having no elevator.
Third floor ain’t that bad as long as you don’t exceed your carrying capacity. Going up 3 floors by stairs isn’t much compared to the ~10 minutes of walking back from the store. Really not that bad with a bag each hand.
It starts getting much with places with > 4 floors but that’s pretty rare without an elevator. You waste more time waiting for the elevator than actually going up anyway when you’re on floor < 3.
When you live in a city generally the pattern changes. You don’t take the car and go do your biweekly costco trip and come back with 20 bags of groceries. You get like 1-4 at a time, and go more often.
A lot of the time just going out anywhere, you can fit a quick grocery stop on your way home so you come back with maybe 5 items. It’s perfectly reasonable to leave work, grab a quick steak at the butcher, some veggies at the store, and you get home with fresh food to cook. Or even go back out because you forgot an item.
City life is just a whole lifestyle. It gets you in shape, and you just don’t think that much about having an elevator to go to the second floor.
I lived on the 3rd floor in my first apartment, no elevator. We had no car either so we dealt with it by getting groceries more often. The grocery store was only a few blocks away, so it wasn’t terrible. We could have made it easier with a bike or a folding cart, but we were young and stupid so we just carried it.
I also took the subway to work which added at least another 2-4 sets of stairs I walked up every weekday. Getting to my front door honestly felt like only half of my commute home. It absolutely sucked, but my calves were incredible.
I used to work in public health in NYC. I got to see all the people comign into the hospital. The elderly folks who had lived their whole lives on the higher floors of walkup apartments were almost always in great shape compared to their contemporaries who weren’t getting exercise every day.
