Furniture Pickups and Single Item Delivery in Central London

People underestimate this constantly. A three seater sofa, a king size mattress, a marble topped table or a full height wardrobe are all beyond what one person should be carrying up a Central London staircase, and attempting it is how furniture and walls get damaged.

Almost nothing domestic is too heavy for two people. A great deal of it is too wide for a staircase, which is a different problem and the reason we ask for dimensions rather than weight.

Three things: the dimensions of the item, the floor at each end, and whether there is a lift. From those we can price it properly and tell you whether it is actually going to fit.

If you are not sure of the dimensions, the listing usually has them, and a photograph of the staircase is worth more than a description of it. We would far rather establish that a wardrobe will not turn on your half landing before you buy it than after it is sitting in your hallway.

None of the IKEA stores serving London are in the centre. Greenwich, Wembley, Croydon and Tottenham all mean a drive, a car park and a collection desk, which is exactly the trip that is impossible without a van. We do the whole run: collect against your order number, load it, and bring it back to your flat.

Flat-pack is deceptive. A wardrobe box is thin and looks manageable, and then weighs upwards of forty kilos and is two metres long. Length is the real problem rather than weight: a long box will not turn on a Georgian half landing however light it is, and that catches people out far more often than a heavy sofa does.

One practical constraint worth knowing before you book. Retail car parks almost all have a height barrier, commonly around two metres, which a Luton will not clear. We bring a vehicle that fits under it. If your order genuinely needs a bigger van than the barrier allows, we will tell you and load at the goods entrance instead.

Second-hand buying works brilliantly right up to the moment you have to collect a sofa from a fourth floor flat in Hackney with a seller who has already gone out. Private sellers are frequently vague about access and occasionally about availability, and almost none of them will help you lift.

Give us the seller's number and we will confirm a collection window directly before the day. It means the van does not arrive at a locked door and you do not pay for a wasted trip. If the seller's end is upstairs too, say so, because that makes it a two person job at both ends rather than one.

Auction houses and antique dealers around Mayfair, Bermondsey and Islington are the other half of this. They have their own rules, usually a paid invoice and a fixed collection window. Tell us the house and we will work to it.

Glass topped tables, mirrors, artwork and marble all travel flat and padded rather than upright and hopeful. That needs planning into the load rather than improvising at the kerb, so tell us when you book.

For genuinely valuable items, tell us the value at the point of booking so we can confirm in writing that it is covered before anything is lifted rather than afterwards. Undeclared high value pieces are covered only to our standard limit, which is true of every firm in this trade whether they mention it or not.

This is the whole difference between us and a courier. We carry the item up the stairs, through the door and into the room you want it in. If it needs the feet taking off to clear a doorway, we take the feet off.

What we do not do is assemble flat-pack. We will move it boxed or assembled, and we will reattach sofa feet and legs we removed to get it in, but building a wardrobe from parts is a different trade.