Moving house in a building with no lift

Fourth floor, no lift. The trouble is not strength, and anyone who has been through it knows that: everything in your home leaves by the same flight of stairs, one load at a time, and how long the day lasts is decided by the number of times you go down and back up. That number is not decided on moving day. It is decided in the weeks before, while you fill the boxes.

The count is trips, not kilos

Take one room and count the loads, not the kilos. A trip is going down loaded and coming back up empty-handed, and the time goes on the climb back, when you are carrying nothing.

The right load has one rule, and it is not about weight: you have to see the step in front of you. If what you are carrying reaches your eyes it is too big even when it is light, because on stairs you look at your feet and not at where you are going.

The declared load capacity of a Cangubox is 30 kg per box. On stairs that number is a ceiling and not a target: you can carry thirty kilos on the flat, push it on a trolley, or lift it with someone else; on your own, down four flights, you cannot. Books reach that limit without anyone noticing, which is why they go in flat, in low piles: a box of books surprises whoever picks it up.

Count how you hold it, too. You pick a taped box up from underneath, arms under the base, and from there it rises in front of your face. A Cangubox has two handles, recessed in the short sides: you hold it at hip height, and the step stays in view.

Going down before the day, not all on it

With no lift there is one lever: take loads off moving day and move them to the days before. Six boxes carried down the Sunday before are six trips you do not make on the day, and six trips made without rushing.

With the keys to the new place already in hand, every load you take before is one load less on the stairs on the day the van comes. If you do not have them, full boxes do not pile up on the landing: they pile up in whichever room of your own flat is nearest the door.

This holds on one condition, though: a full box has to stay shut, without you opening it and taping it again to slip in one more thing. The lid of a Cangubox is not a separate piece: two halves hinged to the box itself, clipped to one another, hold it shut with no tape. The boxes stack even closed and loaded. The listed rental periods are two weeks and four weeks, so the boxes are in the house during the weeks when you pack, not on the morning of the move. The plan for the weeks before matters most here: every day you have ahead of you is a trip you can move.

The flights in your arms, the flat part on wheels

The stairs end at the front door, and the second stretch starts there: the hall, the courtyard, the pavement up to the van. You repeat that on every trip too, so where the van stops counts as much as your floor does. Stopping it outside the front door is a concession the council grants, and the permit has to be asked for more than a week ahead, because the reservation only exists once the signs are standing on the pavement.

The Dolly comes with every rental, the trolley on four swivel wheels that you stack the boxes on, to push them instead of carrying them. Four wheels do not do steps: on the stairs the Dolly stays at the bottom. Its place is where there are no stairs, and with no lift you use it as a handover point: the boxes come down in your arms, they stop where the floor turns flat, and the trolley takes them to the van.

Bear in mind that the stairs are not yours alone. The landing belongs to everybody, your neighbour's door opens outwards, somebody's pushchair is already there: the column of boxes goes inside the flat or next to the van, never in between.

What you do not carry down yourself

Some things do not come down without a lift, and it is not about being fit: a piano, a safe, a sofa that will not turn on the landing. Other times it is not the object but you: a back that has given trouble before, two people when four were needed, three days' notice and no day off. In those cases you call a removal firm, and you call before you start. Then there is the third way, and almost nobody mentions it: they do the flights and the transport, you pack calmly in the weeks before, and the criteria for choosing start from the floor and the lift, because that is the variable that shifts everything else.

Before you fix the date, run three tests. Count the loads room by room, the way you will really carry them, and write the number down: that is the length of your day. Then fill a box, lift it, go down one flight and come back up: that is the right load, and it is almost always less than what you had put in. Finally measure the stretch between the front door and the spot where the van can stand. For the pieces that will not come down the stairs, decide now who carries them, and not on the morning itself.