Level 00
Ground floor, which is not the same as easy
The quickest storey there is, provided the path, the gate and the threshold behave themselves. Where they do not, a ground-floor flat can take longer than a second-floor one with a straight staircase — and the reasons are all outside the front door.
A gate post in the middle of a path is a more common obstacle than a staircase.
What to measure on the ground floor
The things that actually slow it down
A raised threshold that a trolley cannot cross. A front gate with a post beside it, making the opening narrower than the path on either side. A long tiled path with a wall on one side and planting on the other, and no room to turn a mattress at the end of it.
And the commonest of all: a communal front door that opens inward into a small lobby, so everything has to be lifted over the swing rather than carried straight through.
Where the vehicle stands
On a level job the carry from the vehicle to the door is a much larger share of the work than it is upstairs, because there is nothing else to slow you down. Ten metres and eighty metres are completely different days for an identical flat.
So we ask where a vehicle can legally stand and how far that is from the door, and we would rather have a photograph of the frontage than a description of it.
Maisonettes and split levels
A ground-floor maisonette with its own internal stairs is not a ground-floor job. It is a small house, and we quote it as one, because the internal flight has all the same properties as a communal one and usually a tighter turn.
The same is true of ground-floor flats with a few steps down into a rear extension, which is a common arrangement in converted terraces and reliably forgotten on a quote form.
Gardens, sheds and side returns
Ground-floor flats frequently come with a garden, and gardens come with sheds, furniture, pots and a side return barely wide enough to walk down. All of it has to come out past the same gate as everything else.
Mention it when you ask for a price. A shed's worth of garden equipment is a real part of a load and it is almost never on the list.
- Garden furniture: measured against the side return, not the garden gate.
- Sheds: emptied by you, dismantled by arrangement, and never assumed.
- Pots: heavy, awkward and frequently the last thing anybody thinks of.
- Barbecues and gas bottles: gas is not carried under any circumstances.
- Bicycles: easy, but they take more van space than people expect.
LVL 00
Questions about ground floor
- Do you need the gate taken off?
- Occasionally, and only with the freeholder's agreement. We will tell you at survey if we think it is coming, because it is not something to raise on the morning.
- What if there is a step at the front door?
- Normal and easily handled, but it means a trolley cannot roll straight in. On a long carry with a high threshold the crew size may go up, because the trolley stops being useful at exactly the wrong point.
- Is a ground-floor flat cheaper than an upstairs one?
- Often, and not always. We price the route rather than the altitude, and a long path with a narrow gate can cost more work than one flight of straight stairs.
- Can you move the garden as well?
- Yes, provided we know about it. Garden loads are bulky, dirty and slow, and they need van space allocated to them rather than squeezed in at the end.
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.