Getting furniture down a Philadelphia row home staircase

The short answer

There is no stair charge in Philadelphia. Not per flight, not for a walk-up, not for a trinity, not for the turn at the landing.

Those are the same numbers whether the item is in the vestibule or three floors up under the roof. The minimum is $75 per visit.

Why Philadelphia staircases are the problem

The standard Philadelphia row home is narrow and deep, and the staircase runs up the side wall with a turn at the landing. That turn is the whole story. A straight flight will take almost anything at an angle. A flight with a 90-degree platform partway up will not, because the object has to rotate inside a box the width of the house minus a party wall.

The specific obstacles, in the order crews hit them:

• The newel post at the bottom. Immovable, and exactly where a sofa arm wants to be.
• The landing. Often only a little deeper than the stair is wide, which means the pivot has to happen in stages.
• The ceiling above the landing. You cannot tip an object up to clear a turn if there is a soffit or a bulkhead over your head.
• The second-floor hall. In a two-bedroom row home it is frequently narrower than a queen box spring is long.
• The vestibule. Two doors, one small square between them, and a step down to the pavement.

The trinity: Philadelphia's hardest staircase

Trinity houses — three rooms stacked one per floor, connected by a single corner staircase — are concentrated in Queen Village, Bella Vista, Society Hill and pockets of Old City and Fitler Square. They are beautiful and they are, from a furniture-moving point of view, the most hostile domestic geometry in the city.

The stair is a winder: pie-shaped treads wrapping around a central post, sometimes enclosed, with a headroom that clears a person and nothing more. There is no landing to pivot on because the whole staircase is a pivot. Anything rigid and longer than about the diameter of the stairwell physically cannot be walked up or down.

Which raises the obvious question people ask us: how did the sofa get in? Usually one of three ways. It was carried in before a wall or a rail was finished. It came apart and was reassembled upstairs. Or it went through a window.

All three of those are also ways it can come out, and none of them cost extra.

What crews actually do

• Legs off. First move on almost every sofa, and it buys several inches at the pivot.
• Cushions and backs off. Many sofas have a removable back or a bolted frame under the upholstery.
• On its side, then on its end. The vertical carry down a winder is standard technique and it is why two experienced people beat four inexperienced ones.
• Bannister sections. Occasionally a spindle run comes off and goes back. Ask first; in a Society Hill house with original joinery, the answer may be no.
• The window route. For a rigid box spring in a trinity, out a second-floor front window onto the street below is sometimes genuinely the correct answer.
• Cut it. For something that is going to a truck anyway, a sofa frame can simply be broken down in the room. It is the fastest route and it damages nothing on the way out.

That last option is the quiet advantage of removal over moving. Nobody has to preserve it.

The box spring conversation

The single most common Philadelphia stairwell failure is a queen box spring. A mattress flexes; a box spring is a rigid timber frame and it does not.

If you are replacing a bed in a row home or a trinity, buy a split box spring or a platform frame. It is the one purchasing decision that will save you real grief in this housing stock.

For the one currently upstairs: a box spring alone is $92, or $143 as a set with the mattress, and getting it out is our problem. A sofa and a box spring in the same visit is $126 + $92 = $218.

Other Philadelphia stair situations

• The third-floor West Philly walk-up. Spruce Hill, Cedar Park and Powelton Village twins converted into flats. Big rooms, tall ceilings, three flights and a shared front door. No charge for any of it.
• The basement staircase. Steep, straight, low headroom, often with a door at the top that opens the wrong way. This is how washers ($133) and dryers ($128) come up in South Philly.
• The outside hatchway. Bulkhead doors and stone steps down to a basement in older South Philly stock. Wide enough for a person, not much more.
• The pilot house. A narrow stair from the third floor up to a roof deck in Fishtown or Northern Liberties. Everything from a roof deck comes down this way.
• Manayunk's public steps. Some houses sit above the street behind a flight of municipal steps. That is a carry before the carry.

What you can do to help

Not much, and that is deliberate — but these three things shorten the visit:

• Tell us the floor and the stair type when you book. "Third floor, trinity, winder stairs" gets the right crew size. "Second floor" does not tell us whether there is a landing.
• Clear the route. Especially the landing and the vestibule. A row home has one path and everything uses it.
• Protect what you care about. Take pictures off the stairwell wall. Crews pad and go carefully, but a narrow stairwell has no margin and a frame on the wall at the pivot point is asking for it.

Then stay out of the way and let two people who do this every day on these blocks get on with it.

Frequently asked questions