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Moving in or out of an Edinburgh tenement

A lot of Edinburgh lives in tenements: four or five storeys of stone flats around a shared stair, from Marchmont and Bruntsfield to Leith and Dalry. They are good places to live and awkward places to move a sofa. Here is how to make the day go well.

Main door, common stair or top floor

A main-door flat has its own front door on the street, and moving in or out of one is not much different from a house. Everything else opens off the common stair, reached through the street door and the close. The higher the flat, the more trips up and down that stair, and the more the loading time grows. A top-floor flat in an older tenement with no lift takes a good deal longer to empty than the same flat on the ground floor.

Measure the turn, not the stair

Stairs in Edinburgh tenements are usually wide enough. Furniture gets stuck at the turns, where one flight meets the next, and at the last landing, where the front door of the flat opens at an angle you cannot change. Stone turnpike stairs in the Old Town and some older closes are tighter still.

• Measure the sofa's height, depth and length, and its diagonal (from the back top corner to the front bottom corner).
• Measure the narrowest point of the stair, the headroom at each turn and the width of the flat's door, frame to frame.
• If the sofa's diagonal is less than the door and the turns, it can usually be tipped on end and walked round.

If a piece will not go round the turns, nothing on the day will change that, so find out before the van is booked rather than on the landing.

What comes apart

Most furniture comes apart somewhere. Sofa feet unscrew. Many corner sofas split into sections. Bed frames come down to a headboard, two sides and slats. Flat-pack wardrobes should be taken down to panels, because they rarely survive being carried up a stair in one piece. Wardrobe doors come off their hinges.

Put the screws and fittings for each piece in a bag and tape it to the piece. Do the dismantling before the van arrives, unless you have agreed otherwise with your driver, because the time spent with a screwdriver is time on the job.

The stair belongs to everyone

The common stair is shared, and for a few hours you will be filling it. A short note on the stair door the day before, saying when you are moving, goes a long way with the neighbours.

• Keep the stair and the close clear. Do not stack boxes on landings overnight: in a fire, the stair is everyone's way out.
• Bikes and prams often live at the foot of the stair. Ask their owners to move them for the morning.
• Watch the banister and the walls on the turns. Blankets on the corners of big pieces protect both.

Time, people and the van

When you book, choose the loading time with the stairs in mind. A one-bedroom flat on the third floor takes noticeably longer than the same flat at street level, and if the job runs over, the extra time is charged at the driver's rate shown before you book. It is cheaper to book enough than to run over.

Heavy single pieces, such as a sofa bed, a piano stool full of music or a solid oak wardrobe, need two people on a stair. Some drivers can bring a helper, and the form shows which. If you are planning to lend a hand yourself, say so in the notes.

Finally, the van has to be close. A tenement street in Marchmont or Gorgie is likely to be in a controlled parking zone, with bays on both sides and few gaps. The page on parking, permits and suspended bays sets out the options, from visitor permits to suspending a bay for the morning.