Measure the Lift Before Moving Day, Not During It

The scene is familiar to everyone in this trade: four people, a three-seater sofa, a lift it does not fit into, and a customer being told for the first time that it is going up seven flights of stairs. It is entirely avoidable and it takes ten minutes.

The four measurements

1. Lift door width. The opening, not the frame. This is the number that stops most things.
2. Lift internal width and depth. Both, at floor level.
3. Lift internal height. Often overlooked, and it is what decides whether a tall wardrobe can go in diagonally.
4. Staircase width at the narrowest turn. Not the straight run — the turn. Include any handrail, because the handrail is what you actually hit.

Add one more if you have a landing with a low ceiling over the turn: the headroom at that point. It is what stops a mattress being angled round the corner.

What to measure them against

The three items that most often fail to fit, in order:

• The three-seater sofa. Length, depth and height. A sofa can often go in on its end if the lift height allows, which is why measurement 3 matters.
• The king or queen mattress. Mattresses bend, but only so far, and a pocket-spring mattress bent hard is a damaged mattress.
• The double-door fridge. Height and depth with the doors on. This one rarely has a workaround.

After those: tall wardrobes, dining tables with fixed legs, treadmills, and large-format televisions in their boxes.

The rule of thumb

Leave 5 cm of clearance on every dimension. A sofa that is exactly the width of the lift door does not go through the lift door — hands need to be somewhere, and nobody carries anything perfectly straight.

When something genuinely will not fit

There are four options, in descending order of preference:

1. Dismantle it. Most beds, many wardrobes and some sofas come apart. We bag and label the fittings per item so it goes back together.
2. Take it up the stairs. Slower and it needs more crew, which is why it belongs in the quote rather than on the day.
3. Hoist it through a balcony or window. Occasionally the right answer for a bungalow or a low floor. It needs planning and it is not something to improvise.
4. Do not take it. Sometimes the honest answer. A sofa that cannot reach the fourth floor is not going to reach it on a different day either, and knowing that in Dehradun is much better than knowing it in Gurgaon.

Where this bites hardest

NCR and Bengaluru high-rises, where service lifts are often smaller than the passenger lifts and are the only ones you are allowed to use for a move. Older Dehradun houses, where staircases turn sharply and were built for people rather than furniture. And Mussoorie and the hill stations, where the constraint is not the lift but the number of steps between the vehicle and the door.

What to send us

The four numbers, and a photograph of the staircase turn taken from the bottom looking up. That photograph tells a surveyor more than a paragraph of description, and it is the single most useful thing you can send about a destination we cannot visit.