Six floors, six different jobs

A basement and a ground-floor flat sit a metre apart and have nothing in common. A top-floor conversion in a block with a lift is a stair job with extra steps. Each page below gives the measurement that decides that storey.

Every figure we ask for is one you can take yourself with a tape.

Street level and below

Level, or going up on the way out. Two opposite problems that look similar on a form.

LVL −01 The only floor where everything goes up on the way out Basement and lower ground The one storey in London where the load leaves upward. Area steps, a railing gate that is narrower than the steps it guards, and a light well that decides whether anything long can turn at the bottom. Nothing about it resembles a ground-floor job. LVL 00 Level with the street, which is not the same as easy Ground floor The quickest storey there is, provided the front path, the gate and the threshold behave. Where they do not — a raised step, a gate post, a tiled path with no room to turn — a ground-floor flat can be slower than a second-floor one with a straight stair.

Above, on foot

Where the staircase is the job. We measure the turn before anything else.

LVL 01–02 The London default, and the staircase is the whole job First and second floor, no lift More of this city lives one or two floors up a shared staircase than anywhere else, and the staircase is what we measure. The clear diagonal at the tightest turn decides which of your furniture can physically come down it, and it is almost never what people expect. LVL 03+ Where the lift stops one floor short Top floor and loft conversions Converted top floors are the storey most often misdescribed, because the building has a lift and the flat is not on it. The last flight is usually the narrowest and steepest in the building, and it was built after everything else was finished.

Above, by lift

A lift is three measurements and a booking, not a solution.

LVL 03+ A lift is a dimension, not an answer Upper floors with a lift A lift solves the height and introduces three new measurements: the door width, the car depth, and whether it is shared. A wardrobe that will not stand up in a lift car has to go up the stairs regardless of how many floors there are.

Every floor

A house, worked top down so the staircase below stays clear.

ALL LVLS Loft, bedrooms, ground, cellar — in that order, downward A whole house, floor by floor A house is not a large flat. It is four or five storeys of separate problems stacked on one staircase, and the order matters: the loft comes out first because the staircase below it has to stay clear, and the cellar comes out last because it is the only load going up.

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.

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