Will It Get Through the Door? Buying Oversized Furniture Online Without the Stairwell Surprise

Back in 1999 Ross Geller was carrying a new sofa up the stairwell of his building with Rachel and Chandler on the other end, shouting “pivot” at them while the thing wedged itself deeper into the turn, and the reason that scene is still being quoted 27 years later is that most of us have been on one end of that sofa. The part that gets forgotten is that he was doing it right. Pivoting is how a sofa goes up a stair. He had measured the sofa, and he had measured the apartment, and the turn on the landing was the one thing he had never put a tape on.

Big furniture bought online is going to fail, when it fails, in 1 of 3 places, the door, the turn, or the stair, and hardly ever in the room, because the room is the one thing everyone measures. So what follows is the 7 measurements that decide whether a sofa or a wardrobe is reaching the room at all, and it starts with the fact that changes how you read every product page after today.

The number that has to go through the door is the sofa’s depth, front to back, and its length has nothing to do with it. A sofa is not carried through a doorway flat, it is stood on one end and tilted, and once it is on its end the dimension facing the opening is the depth. People are holding the 84 inch length against a 32 inch door, deciding it is hopeless, and either settling for a smaller sofa than they wanted or paying for a white glove service they were never going to need, when the sofa they wanted would have gone through on its end with the legs off.

The 4 Numbers On The Sofa

A decent product page is listing the first 3 of these and a good one is listing the fourth, and if the fourth is missing it is worth an email, because a retailer that cannot tell you the diagonal depth is a retailer that has not been asked it often enough.

The width is arm to arm, and it is the number that has to fit the room and never has to fit the door. The depth is the front of the seat to the back of the frame at the widest point, and on a 3 seat sofa that is 84 to 90 inches (213 to 229 cm) long the depth is only 35 to 40 inches (89 to 102 cm), which is the number facing the doorway. The height, floor to the top of the back, is mattering for the ceiling over a stair landing when the sofa is being carried upright and for not much else.

The fourth is the diagonal depth, a straight line across the side of the sofa from the bottom front corner to the top back corner, and it is the one deciding it, because when a sofa is tilted through a door it is riding on that diagonal. On a 40 inch deep sofa the diagonal depth is usually coming out at 32 to 36 inches (81 to 91 cm), shorter than the depth, since the back is sloping and the seat is sitting lower than the arm.

How To Take The Diagonal Yourself

On a sofa in a shop, or one you already own, put the end of the tape on the floor at the front corner of the arm and run it up across the side of the sofa to the top back corner, and read it there. When I did it on my own sofa, which is 38 inches deep, the diagonal came out at 33, and those 5 inches were the difference between a sofa that would have stuck in my hall and a sofa that turned the corner with room to spare.

The 3 Numbers In The House

These are the ones to have on your phone before opening a single product page, because they are ruling sofas out while you are still shopping instead of on the morning the truck arrives.

The Narrowest Door, Measured Clear

A standard interior door is sold as 32 inches (81 cm), and once the frame stops and the thickness of the open door are in the way, the clear opening is coming out at about 30 to 31. A standard front door is 36 inches (91 cm) and clears about 33 to 34, which is why deliveries are coming in that way. Older houses and a lot of apartments are running 30 inch interior doors, and those clear about 28, and 28 is where a deep sofa starts to be a conversation. Measure from the frame stop on one side to the face of the open door on the other, because frame to frame is giving you a number the sofa will never see.

The Tightest Turn

A hallway wants to be 36 inches (91 cm) wide for a straight carry and 40 for an angled one, and the door at the end of a hall is rarely the problem. The problem is a door off the side of a narrow hall, where the sofa has to come along the hall and turn 90 degrees into the opening with no run up, and for that turn to work flat the sofa has to be shorter than the hall width and the door width added together. If it is not, and on most sofas it is not, the sofa is going in on its end, which is fine as long as the ceiling in the hall is allowing it to stand up.

The Stair, And The Ceiling Above It

The width of the stair is mattering less than people think and the landing is mattering more. A sofa goes up a stair tilted, following the slope, and at the turn it has to come level and swing, and that is where the ceiling over the landing is catching the top corner. So the 3 numbers on a stair are the stair width, the landing width, and the height from the landing floor to the ceiling above it, and if that ceiling height is less than the sofa’s width, the sofa is not standing up at the turn. That is the measurement Ross needed.

A 40 Inch Sofa Through A 32 Inch Door

Take the deepest common sofa, 40 inches, and put it against the 3 doors most houses have, and it is easier to see how much room there really is.

Reading your own door off that is simple enough. If the narrowest door on the route is a 32 and the sofa’s diagonal depth is under 31, it is going in. If the diagonal is 33 and the door is a 30, you are into taking the legs and the door off, and it is still probably going in, but that is the moment to look at the turn behind the door, because a sofa that is barely clearing an opening has no room to swing on the other side of it.

The Height Trick Crews Use

A doorway is 80 inches (203 cm) tall and 32 wide, which is making its own diagonal about 86 inches corner to corner, and when a crew leads with one corner of the sofa through the top of the frame and tilts, they are borrowing that 86. It is the reason a sofa that is looking impossible on paper is sliding through with 2 people who have done it before, and it is worth watching how they bring it in, because if you ever move, the sofa is leaving the same way.

What Comes Off

Before any of the numbers above get tight, there are inches to be had for nothing. Most sofa legs are unscrewing, and taking them off is gaining 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 cm), so look for “removable legs” on the listing and ask if it is not there. Lifting an interior door off its hinges is gaining another 1 to 1.5 inches and taking 2 minutes with a screwdriver, and the door stop comes off too if it is a separate strip. On a sofa with loose back cushions they are lifting off and the depth is dropping, and on a tight back sofa they are not, which is why tight back sofas are the ones getting stuck in the first place.

And a growing number of sofas sold online are shipping with bolt on arms or a bolt on back for exactly this reason, so if a listing says “arms detach” or “ships in 3 boxes”, that is a sofa designed by someone who has carried one up an apartment stair. When none of it is enough, a modular sectional is arriving as 3 or 4 pieces, each of them about the size of an armchair, and going up any stair in the building.

The Wardrobe And The Table, The Pieces That Cannot Tilt

Do you remember that scene in The Music Box, the Laurel and Hardy short from 1932, where they are delivering a piano to a house at the top of 131 concrete steps, and they get it to the top, and it comes all the way back down, and they carry it up again? It won the first Oscar ever given to a short film and the steps are still there in Los Angeles with people photographing them. I would rather you did not end up in that situation, and a full height wardrobe or an 8 seat dining table is the piece that puts you in it, because unlike a sofa it is not giving you a diagonal to work with.

A solid wardrobe is arriving as a box, and a box is only ever going through an opening at its 2 smallest dimensions, so the measurement is the carton’s width against the door’s clear width and the carton’s depth against the door’s height, and there is no tilt to save you. That is why the tall pieces sold online are mostly flat pack now, 40 or 50 panels in 3 cartons that go up a stair one at a time and become a wardrobe in the bedroom, and the assembly you were dreading is the thing that got it into the house. An 8 seat table is usually shipping with the legs off and the top in its own crate, and it is the top that decides it, a 96 inch (244 cm) top carried flat needs a hall it can turn in, and carried on edge it needs a ceiling taller than 96 inches at every point on the route, including the landing.

The Box Is Bigger Than The Sofa

All of the numbers above are the furniture, and what is arriving at your door is the carton, so a sofa listed at 38 inches deep can be shipping in a box 44 deep with corner protectors and a pallet underneath. Look for “shipping dimensions” or “box dimensions” on the page and measure the front door against those, because the crew is bringing the box to the threshold and unboxing it there, and if the box is not clearing the porch it is being unpacked in the rain.

What “Delivery” Means, Tier By Tier

The fee on the checkout page and the service you are getting are coming apart here, and the returns page is not the place to find that out.

• Curbside means the truck stops at the kerb, the pallet comes down on a lift gate, and the box is yours from there. It is often free, and it is the tier that leaves a 90 kg (200 lb) carton on the driveway.
• Threshold means across the front door and not a step further, so no one in that crew is going up your stairs.
• Room of choice means into the room you name with 2 people, and it is usually the tier that costs money and the one worth paying for on anything going upstairs.
• White glove means into the room, unboxed, assembled, positioned, and the packaging taken away, and it is the only tier where somebody else is doing the pivot.

Big items are not moving through the parcel network, they are going freight, through a terminal, then a regional depot, then a final mile carrier who is ringing to book a window, and the window is where the day is being won or lost, because missing a freight appointment is not a card through the letterbox, it is the sofa going back to the depot and a redelivery charge. That last leg used to be a phone call the day before and a 9 to 5 wait. The retailers doing it properly now are putting a live link in your hand for it, and systems like NXTPoint last mile tracking are what is behind that link, the carrier and the customer looking at the same map of where the truck is on the day, so that the wait is a 2 hour window and you can see it coming down the street. Whichever system a retailer is using, it is worth asking before you pay whether you are getting a window and a link, or a phone number and hope.

If It Still Will Not Go

Then we will break the wall! Hahahah

Ask the crew about the window before they drive away, because in older houses and in high rises, taking a ground floor window out of its frame to pass a sofa through is happening more often than anyone expects, and a good delivery team is telling you on the doorstep whether it is an option.

Read the returns page before it is needed rather than after, because a pair of shoes is going back with a printed label and a sofa is going back on a freight truck you have to book, at a return shipping cost that can be running into the hundreds, with a restocking fee of 15 to 25% on top, and made to order pieces usually cannot go back at all. Look for the words “oversized”, “freight” and “restocking” on that page before paying, and photograph the box before it is opened, in case the damage turns out to be the carrier’s.

And the turn at the top of the stairs can be measured tonight, while the sofa is still on a screen and the tape is still in the drawer.