Before you decide
Measure the walls, not the rooms
A wall that will take a particular piece is a fact you can decide against. A room that should be fine is a hope, and hopes do not survive a staircase.
The furniture question is the one people most want answered and most often get answered badly, because it is usually answered by eye in a property viewing rather than with a tape measure in an empty room.
It has three parts, and only the first one is about the piece itself: will it go through the door and round the turn, is there a wall long enough for it, and is there anything already built into that wall.
The third is the one that catches people. What you lose when you downsize is almost never floor area alone — it is fitted storage, and a long-held house is full of it.
Where the volume was hiding
A bedroom count describes almost none of a house like this. The volume that catches people out is in the spaces that are not rooms, and every one of them is full. We survey them separately, which is why our quotes tend to be larger at the start and unchanged at the end.
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The loft
Converted or not, it is the single biggest under-estimate in a Northwood house. Christmas, luggage, the children’s things they never collected, and a layer of items nobody has seen since they went up there.
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The garage
Rarely holds a car. Tools, paint, garden things, a workbench and several decades of items that were kept because they might be useful and then were not.
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The cellar
Where there is one, it is usually damp at the edges and full at the middle. Anything paper down there needs looking at sooner rather than later.
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Fitted wardrobes
They do not move, but their contents do, and a wall of them holds far more than a free-standing wardrobe. The new place almost certainly has fewer.
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The airing cupboard and the under-stairs
Small, dense and completely invisible from a room count. Linen, cleaning things, the vacuum, the ironing board, and whatever was put there in a hurry once.
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The garden and the shed
Furniture, pots too heavy for one person, tools, and a shed that has never been fully emptied. In a big Northwood garden this is a load on its own.
How we measure
Four numbers, taken in the empty property
The clear width at the narrowest point of the route in. The depth of the half-landing or the hallway at its corner. The ceiling height directly above any turn — the one everybody forgets. And the diagonal of the piece itself, corner to corner on its longest face, rather than the dimensions on the receipt.
Then the wall: its clear run between obstructions, and whether a radiator, a socket or a door swing takes some of it.
We do this at the survey and we tell you plainly what will not go. Almost everybody has one piece they are determined about, and it is very much better to find out in a tape measure than in a stairwell.
Get in touch
Start whenever you are ready
Including if that is a long way off. We will come and look, talk it through, write it down and then leave you alone until you get in touch again. There is no obligation and we will not chase you.