Every level
A whole house, worked from the top down
A house is not a large flat. It is four or five storeys of separate problems sharing a single staircase, and the order in which those storeys are emptied is the difference between a smooth day and a jammed one.
Loft first, because the staircase beneath it has to stay clear. Cellar last, because it is the only load going up.
What we survey in a house
Why top down
Because every storey below is a route for the one above. If the ground floor is emptied first, the hall fills with furniture and the loft has nowhere to come down to. Work from the top and each floor clears the way for the next.
The cellar goes last for the opposite reason: it is the only load travelling upward, and it should not be doing that across a staircase full of everything else.
The loft
A boarded loft with a fixed ladder is ordinary work. An unboarded loft reached by a drop-down aluminium ladder is a different and more dangerous job, and we will say so at survey rather than on the day.
Either way it comes out first, and it is almost always more than anyone remembers. Suitcases, decorations, boxes labelled by someone who has since forgotten, and at least one item that went up before the hatch was made smaller.
The main turn
Every London house has one staircase turn that decides which furniture can move between floors, and it is usually the one between the ground and first floor. We measure it at survey and work the plan around it.
Where a piece of furniture will not pass it, the honest answers are dismantling, the bannister route if the stairwell is open, or leaving it — and we would rather have that conversation at survey than in a hallway.
Garages, sheds and the side return
The garage has been a store room for a decade, the shed has a decade of garden equipment in it, and the side return is barely wide enough to walk down. All of it comes out past the same front gate as the furniture.
These are the spaces most reliably left off a list, and together they can be a substantial part of a house load. Mention them when you ask for a price.
- Loft first, then bedrooms, then ground floor, then the cellar.
- Outbuildings run in parallel where crew and access allow.
- The main turn is measured and planned around, never improvised at.
- Anything for disposal needs a licensed carrier — we hold no waste licence.
- Pianos are not moved, on any floor, at any crew size.
ALL LVLS
Questions about a whole house, floor by floor
- Do you survey houses in person?
- Yes. A house has too many separate access problems to quote reliably from photographs, and a survey costs less than being wrong about a staircase.
- Can you do it across two vehicles?
- Usually, and often it is the better plan — one loading while the other shuttles. It depends on where a vehicle can legally stand.
- What about a same-day completion?
- Everything is loaded and on the vehicle before anything is expected to happen, with the crew waiting rather than the house. Keys and chains are not in our control, so the plan is built to survive them.
- Will you empty the garage?
- Where things are going to an address, a buyer or a charity that has accepted them, yes. Anything genuinely for disposal needs a licensed carrier, which we are not.
Send us one measurement
The clear diagonal across the tightest turn on your staircase, corner to corner, with the handrail in place. That single figure answers more questions about a London move than a room-by-room inventory does.