We had a tough local delivery this past Saturday. Two H&M leather sofas and two chairs going to a townhouse about 50 miles from the store and my delivery team could not get the sofas in the upper floors of the house (main living area). These were Pulte- built town-homes and my customer had just moved into them - and the architect designed it with a weight-bearing support beam protruding from the central staircase that prevented even a moderate sized sofa from coming up the stairway! The only way to get a sofa into the living areas was through the 2nd floor deck, but the builder didn't include the deck with the home and so none was attached to the townhouse. Crazy design! I think every architect should have to work delivering furniture for 3 months as a course requirement - then they wouldn't design like this.

What are the choices with this happens?

* Try to push it through. This means literally jamming the pieces past the obstruction, and that will mean scuffing and marks on the walls and the new furniture. Not something we like to do and we require a 'sign-off' before we will do that.

* Call in Dr. Sofa and have him cut the sofas in two, take them in and re-assemble. I don't like to do this, but have used them in the past when there is no other way - primarily in apartment buildings where modifying the structure is not possible.

* Accept Delivery and store in a garage or other enclosed space out of the weather until such time as you can have a carpenter come in and make the necessary modifications to the home to create egress (or build a deck, etc)

* Return to the store whereupon it can go back to the sales floor and be sold over time, in which case the customer recoups their money when its sold to another customer.

In the instance we encountered, the customer opted to go with # 3 and we left the two sofas in their garage. Likely they will be there for a few months until they can get a deck built and I'm sure they were disappointed that they physically could not fit into their home, and they were not large sofas, just average size. When you buy a home, and when you shop for furniture, pay mind to how things are going to get into the home. The retail selling dealer has no idea you may have difficult egress points and we can only do so much to try to get it into the home on delivery day.