Measuring Your Stairs Before a Delivery
A three-seat sofa arrives at a second-floor flat off Agricola Street. It clears the front door. It clears the stairwell width. It stops dead at the landing turn, because nobody measured the ceiling height above the corner, and there is no angle that gets a 90-inch sofa around a 90-degree turn under a 7-foot ceiling.
The delivery team goes home with the sofa. Do these six measurements first and that call does not happen.
1. Every doorway on the route
Width and height, measured at the narrowest point with the door open. If the door itself protrudes into the opening, measure to the face of the door, not the frame. Many interior doors can be lifted off their hinges to buy an inch and a half, which is often exactly what is needed.
2. Stairwell width
Measure between the walls, and separately between the handrail and the opposite wall, because the handrail is what actually limits you. Note whether the handrail can be removed; on older homes it is usually screwed through to a stud and comes off in ten minutes.
3. Ceiling height above the stairs
This is the one people miss. Measure vertically from the nose of a step to the ceiling directly above it, at the lowest point of the run. On a staircase under a second flight, or under a sloped roof, that number can be well under seven feet.
4. The landing turn
Stand on the landing and measure its depth, its width, and the ceiling height above it. A sofa going around a turn needs to pivot, and the space it needs is roughly the length of the sofa on the diagonal. If the landing is 40 inches deep and the sofa is 90 inches long, it does not turn regardless of how strong the delivery crew is.
5. The furniture's diagonal, not its length
Sofas go up stairs on their side or on end. What matters is the cross-section: the depth measured together with the height, corner to corner. That diagonal number is what has to fit through the narrowest point. A 38-inch deep, 34-inch tall sofa has a diagonal around 51 inches, and that is the figure to compare against your doorway height.
6. Balconies and windows, honestly assessed
If nothing fits, the remaining options are a piece that disassembles or a hoist through a window or balcony, and the second is not something most delivery services offer. Modular sectionals and knock-down frames exist precisely for this problem. In an older building with a tight stairwell, choosing a modular piece at the shopping stage is far cheaper than solving it on delivery day.
Send us your measurements before ordering if you are unsure Email or bring in the doorway width, the stairwell width at the handrail, the ceiling height above the landing, and a photo of the turn. It costs nothing and it is a much better conversation than the one on the landing.
Our delivery crews are our own, they cover a 120 km radius from Halifax and know most of the older buildings in this city, so a measurement question before you order is a short conversation rather than a survey.
modular sectionals. Related: furniture weight and moving difficulty and practical challenges of repositioning sectionals.
