The moving truck was there Saturday. It is now Wednesday and you have made eye contact twice from your driveway without saying anything, which is getting worse each time. You want to introduce yourself before this calcifies into a decade of nodding. You do not want to knock on a door in a house full of boxes and be the person who has to be entertained for forty minutes.
What is appropriate, and what is not
Bring something and leave. Eight minutes at the door, maximum. They have a kitchen in fourteen boxes and no idea where the coffee filters are, and the polite thing is to make the interaction short enough that they do not have to invite you in and then apologize for the state of the house.
Bring shelf-stable food, not a meal. A meal means plates, and their plates are in a box marked KITCHEN MISC. Something they can eat standing up at 4pm while a contractor is in the bathroom is more useful than a lasagna.
Bring the local information nobody can find online. Which day the recycling actually goes out versus what the city website says. Which of the two nearby pizza places is the real one. Where street parking gets ticketed. This is worth more than the food and it takes you thirty seconds.
Do not ask what they paid. Do not comment on the previous owners' divorce. Do not bring the HOA up in the first conversation, even if you are on the board, especially if you are on the board.
What to send
If you'd rather bake it: ciambelline al vino. Oil and wine instead of butter and eggs, they keep for weeks, and most people on your street have never had one. /ricette/. Write the ingredients on the label. A stranger's kitchen is exactly the situation where an unlabeled homemade cookie goes in the trash after you leave.
What to write
- We're at 431, the gray one with the bad hedge. Recycling is Thursday, not Wednesday, whatever the city says.
- Welcome. No need to reciprocate anything, we're just glad the house is lived in again.
- I'm Ana from two doors down. My number's on the back if a package goes missing — it happens on this block.
- You'll want Salvi's on Kentucky, not the one on the corner. Trust me on this.
- Don't feel obligated to come to the door if you're mid-box. Leaving this on the step.
12 more lines for this occasion →
Timing
Day four through day ten. Day one is intrusive — the truck is still there and they are counting furniture. After three weeks it turns into an apology for not having come sooner. Late afternoon on a weekday is the best knock; mornings they are working and weekends they are hauling. If you would rather not knock at all, leave it on the step with a note and your house number, which is a completely acceptable version of this and increasingly the common one. If you are buying rather than baking, use /registro/ to find something within an hour of you and pick it up. A box that traveled forty miles is a better thing to say at a door than one that traveled two thousand.
This page names no brand and earns nothing from what you decide. The bakeries that ship are listed alphabetically by state; our method is here, including what we would have to disclose if that ever changed.