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Thread: Getting it in the Door

  1. #1
    Join Date
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    Default Getting it in the Door

    Wow! What a day... I normally don't do Sunday deliveries, but because of the Tropical Storm coming through the area yesterday we had to cancel our normal Saturday deliveries and my regular guys were not available today. So I grabbed my son and we set off to do them.

    Our first stop was 45 minutes down the highway and we had a beautiful Hancock and Moore Cabo sofa to place in the house. Normally a sofa delivery takes about 10 minutes when egress is good, but today we were there an hour and a half struggling to get clearance through the doorway and taking off doors and components as much as we could. In the end, we needed one more inch on the door and just couldn't get it in the house. Back on the truck it went, and my customer - who really wanted that sofa - was very dissappointed. I felt bad that we couldn't get it in, and knew at first glance it was going to be a challenge. I stayed the hour and a half because they were every nice folks and really wanted the piece. I tried all the tricks in the book but bumped up against the Laws of Physics.

    Its a fine line with a new leather sofa. On upholstery pieces, you can sometimes 'shove' them through the door jambs as fabric has give to it, and will slide. Leather however, does not and it will scratch. So we have to allow for a clean fit through the jambs or risk damaging the piece.

    This is not an uncommon occurence. We run into tight door deliveries on a regular basis, and anything under 32" in width (unemcumbered by storm doors, etc) can be challenging.

    Options for my customer are to either have a new, larger door installed (not as expensive as one might think) or re-select a smaller sofa. It's tough when they don't fit and everyone is dissapointed.
    Duane Collie
    Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
    My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.

  2. #2
    McCall Guest

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    Out of curiosity, let us know if you can whether they go for a new door or a new sofa. I would probably pick the new door myself. In fact I always have immediately installed at least one 36" door in any house I am in. Currently I am in a rented condo, just moved in this week and luckily it has double 36" doors for the front and into the Master bedroom. smallest door is 32" Of course I sometimes need to use my wheelchair and so need wide doors.

    If it funny that people just don't think about whether a piece with fit not only in the room they want it but also through whatever to get to it. I know people who have designed and built dedicated home theaters, who then ordered theater recliners only to find they won't fit through the door. and we are talking soundproof doors and casing here, not an easy swap out.

    Moral is PLAN AHEAD!

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    My customer called today and requested a refund, which was fine by me. I don't want anyone to have to take on the added expense of an unplanned door remodel or to re-select a sofa that they're not really smitten with in order to make it work. They'll have some time to think about how they want to approach it and hopefully will return when they're ready.

    We have more egress issues than can be imagined. People are larger now than in years past, and there is a trend to buying comfortable furniture which is also made larger to accommodate them than it was in the 1900's. Yet, we are always trying to put this new, comfortable furniture in older homes and its not easy to do. Stairways are narrow, sometimes the turn angles are too tight and doorways just not wide enough. My top-selling sofa, the Hancock and Moore Austin High Back, is a big boy, and we struggle to get that one in at least half the time we deliver it. I've been pleading with Jimmy Moore to get that one made with a detachable back, but its apparently not practical to do so and maintain the structural integrity that H&M is famous for. 99% of the time we get them in the house, but a lot of it is due to having an experienced crew who know the tricks and workarounds of sofa delivery.

    Double Recliner Sofas and Sleepers are especially hard to delivery as they tend to be not only large, but quite heavy. We call them "The Heartbreakers" because they break our hearts trying to get them in the homes.

    Our second delivery yesterday was a breeze. A Royal-Pedic Mattress and Box that went right in the front double doors to a wide egress hallway and first floor master bedroom. Took us five minutes. My son said "Dad, that made up for the other one". That house was was of the most beautiful homes I've ever been to, it was just stunning. Overlooking a crystal-clear lake on rolling, groomed hills I could have sat on the back veranda all afternoon with a lemonade just enjoying the view and chatting amicably with the owners. Out in the 'middle of nowhere' a magnificent new home hidden off the beaten path, it was white stucco with a Navy Blue clay-tiled roof, and a marvelous center rotunda.

    Those are the fun ones!
    Duane Collie
    Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
    My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.

  4. #4
    McCall Guest

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    WOW that house does sound beautiful Navy tile and white stucco! As you know I just moved in here in Encino this last week and I am still wondering how the movers got our King size 22" deep mattress in a 4 x 5 foot elevator? I was sure they would take the stairs but no they used the elevator, somehow!

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Aug 2008
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    Lakewood Ranch, Florida
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    Duane,

    I remember as a kid my parents ordered a new sofa for our 2nd floor apartment. The door was narrow and the staircase (interior) to the second floor had a 180 turn with a very small landing. Well the sofa would not fit. Finally the delivery crew was about to give up when my younger brother suggested the window in the back of the house. Sure enough after 4 men, some rope, popping out the picture window and about 1 hour of organized confusion the sofa was in. I still remember the smile on my mom's face, she had her first brand new (not hand me down) sofa. What a joy for her. Just goes to show you the creativity of a young kid who does not understand "it can't be done".

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
    Location
    High Point, NC
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    Default Getting a sofa through a small doorway

    I hope this isn't considered spam, but this problem is precisely what Simplicity Sofas was designed to take care of. Sofas (and chairs) come unassembled in 3 boxes and are guaranteed to fit through any doorway larger than 13 inches wide. They take less than 15 minutes to assemble (My 13 year old put one together in under 7 minutes.)
    Jeff Frank
    www.simplicitysofas.com
    Last edited by simplyjeff; 10-29-2008 at 11:01 AM. Reason: Add website address

  7. #7
    Join Date
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    Its a good thing Jeff. I have some customers that have impossible egress to their homes and there is no way some of the items I have are going to get inside. Now I know where to send them when they have those narrow doors.
    Duane Collie
    Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
    My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.

  8. #8
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    Here's an article that's an eye-opener! Take your new sofa (or old sofa) and cut it up to get it in the house, then bracket it all back together. From the LA TIMES:

    Getting furniture through narrow New York doorways has always been a challenge. Fortunately, there's a thriving group of saw-wielding entrepreneurs to help.

    By Geraldine Baum
    November 27, 2008


    Reporting from New York -- 'I can't watch," said Andrew Clarke, shutting his eyes.

    "You shouldn't," the doctor said calmly.


    The doctor's assistant pulled out an electric saw. He started slicing. The ground was already strewn with staples that had been yanked out. After one, two, three . . . seven incisions, Clarke's $4,000, perfectly worn-in, brown leather couch lay in pieces with the 88-inch-long back surgically separated from the arms and bottom. Clarke's cherished couch looked like a dissected moose.

    "Gosh," he mumbled, his eyes wide, "whatever it takes."

    Sal Giangrande calls himself the New York Couch Doctor, but in fact he's New York's Doctor Whatever It Takes for desperate people like Clarke, who couldn't shimmy his old couch into his new apartment and wasn't willing to give up either one.

    The young real estate executive was moving from one apartment to another in the same brick building in the heart of west Greenwich Village. The new place was bigger and had a spectacular view of the Hudson River but was situated in the middle of a narrow hallway.

    "The movers tried several times, several angles, but they couldn't get the couch around the turn from the hallway into the new place," Clarke said. He was ready to dump it when his doorman told him about the Couch Doctor -- aka Sal Giangrande.

    "This is New York, where people want what they want when they want it," Giangrande said. "I spend all day giving them what they want."

    Sometimes that means peeling the white leather off two oversized parts of an imported sectional worth $30,000, slicing them apart, reassembling them with 36 metal brackets -- and then getting shouted at by the unsatisfied owner because, she insisted, "it still looks bumpy."

    Sometimes that means fielding calls within minutes from hysterical clients who live on opposite sides of Manhattan and both want him to come over right away. One is splayed on her couch in the basement of her new apartment building, while the other is plopped on her new sofa bed that the movers left on the sidewalk in front of her brownstone.

    "I get calls all day long," said Giangrande, who wears his phone headset during dinner with the family and sometimes even to bed. "It never stops."

    This is all part of life in America's vertical capital. In a city of pre-World War II apartments with narrow doorways, modern high-rises with low ceilings, and elevators so small they belong in Old Europe, the Couch Doctor is vital.

    Maneuvering furniture in and out of New York apartments has always been tricky. But in the age of the super-sized couch, this has become even trickier.

    Just 15 years ago the maximum length of a typical couch was 84 inches and the width 34 inches, or thereabouts. But as Americans fell in love with McMansions and grew in girth, the demand for bigger and cushier couches expanded.

    Furniture stores began offering couches as long as 120 inches and as deep as 43 inches -- and the number of doctors of disassembling them grew too. Sofa dismantling became a necessary service in new and old American cities, and even in suburban homes with spiraling staircases and converted basements.

    In New York this is a thriving, perhaps recession-proof business that has attracted energetic entrepreneurs like the Couch Doctor who compete for business by thrusting their business cards at doormen and convincing chain furniture stores like Crate and Barrel and Restoration Hardware to use them exclusively.

    The Couch Doctor's competition includes Dr. Sofa, "the furniture surgeon"; Z Bros. (the owner's grandfather used to build sofas); and Unique Furniture Service, another small operation that switched to hand saws after customers complained that the buzzing of electric saws scared them.

    "I don't think furniture was ever small enough to fit through the typical 28-inch New York doorway," said Maria Thompson, manager of the flagship Mitchell Gold Bob Williams furniture store in SoHo. "But a 100-inch sofa? We have customers who want them but can't begin to fit them through their front doors."

    That's why Thompson makes referrals, so to speak, to the Couch Doctor. Before any sale is final, the company sends an employee to assess whether an overstuffed couch can squeeze around all the corners.

    If the answer is no, the company either recommends another couch or suggests a house call from the Couch Doctor. Many New York furniture stores don't make referrals -- and they end up with clients who get crazy when the sofa doesn't fit and demand a refund. Typically, customers only get back half their money.


    No company wants a lot of returned stock," Giangrande said, "so they send customers to us and hope it all works out."
    He charges about $400 for an easy case, and repeat customers get a discount. He and his crew of four dismantle three to four couches a day on a good week.

    Their biggest challenge was taking apart a custom-made 144-inch couch and putting it back together.


    "Now that was something," the doc said.


    Giangrande, 37, started in the furniture business delivering couches for Castro Convertible. He noticed that the late Bernard Castro got around corners by inventing sleepers that could be taken apart with just a wrench. Giangrande ultimately learned the fine art of knocking down about any variety of couch and started his own business four years ago.

    Giangrande can tell you anything you want to know about the guts of a couch. His general philosophy goes something like this: "You get what you pay for."


    "When you buy something for $399, you get pressed wood that's pretty junky," he said.

    On the other hand, he has a favorite store in Lower Manhattan that imports couches from Italy made of fine leather and solid wood, and when he opens up something like that -- wow, it's a thing to behold.

    Born and raised in Long Island, Giangrande still lives in the same neighborhood with his wife, Holly, and their twin toddlers; he runs the business out of his home, but also traverses New York City making house calls in a white truck emblazoned with a drawing of a little man wearing a stethoscope, tool belt and a mirror on his head and spinning a couch on one finger.

    Giangrande is obsessed with his cases and talks about them constantly at home. "It's very annoying," Holly protested, in her Long Island twang. "We'll have plans to go somewhere, and then he gets an emergency call and I get dropped like a hot potato."

    Giangrande, who has the build of a bouncer and the work ethic of a heart surgeon, said, "It's very exciting -- you have to make a call whether a job can be done, and it's not always clear."

    Like in the case of the $30,000 white leather sectional. Giangrande's crew did an initial assessment and decided the two 90-inch-long pieces of the sectional couldn't be easily taken apart -- and they didn't want to risk ruining something so expensive.

    At 9 that night, Giangrande drove from Long Island to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to take a look for himself. "There were complications," he conceded. "There weren't the usual seams, and it had buttons pressed into the leather. That's why my guys got intimidated. That's where I came in."

    The next morning Giangrande returned with his crew, and within 90 minutes the couches were cut into pieces and swaddled in blankets like newborns. The problem had been a 7-foot-high hallway ceiling; but those babies slid easily out of the elevator and into the living room.

    Just as the customer was coming home -- she hadn't wanted to see the butchering and had gone to get her hair done -- Giangrande hustled to remove a handprint left on the white leather.

    Still, the customer wasn't satisfied when the crew left -- and at one point even canceled the $1,500 check she had paid him. But Giangrande went back several times and meticulously re-pulled the white leather and smoothed out the bumps until finally she was happy. And so was he.
    Duane Collie
    Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
    My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.

  9. #9
    eft Guest

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    There must be a mathematical equation to determine whether the selected piece (sofa) will fit through the door?

  10. #10
    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by eft View Post
    There must be a mathematical equation to determine whether the selected piece (sofa) will fit through the door?
    That assumes all doorways, stairs, and walls are constant! Its not always the door openings that get you, its the adjacent walls, banisters, corner angles and the like. Plus, every piece of furniture is different as well. I suppose one could develop a computer program based on all the specifics and plug in the data, but at the end of the day a trained eye is still the best bet. After doing probably 5,000 home deliveries in 26 years I can eyeball a hall or doorway and tell you with 95% accuracy if its going to make it. The ole human brain and a good dose of experience are still the best bet. The interesting part is when I tell a customer its not going to go, and they ask us to try anyways.

    One of the trends in upholstery is to build larger pieces for modern, large homes (aka "McMansions") and then customers want to fit these into their older, smaller homes that were never designed for this size furniture. It can be a real problem when ordering long distance and the piece does not fit in the house.
    Duane Collie
    Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
    My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.

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