Pianos, Pool Tables, and Armoires: The Oversized Item Problem

In most downsizes, ninety percent of the household is straightforward and a handful of objects cause nearly all of the difficulty.

The upright piano. The pool table. The nine-foot dining table with the leaves. The armoire that came from a grandmother and was assembled in the room it stands in. The gun safe. The treadmill. The workbench somebody built in place in 1994.

These items have three things in common. They are heavy, they are emotionally loaded more often than they look, and they cannot be decided at the last minute. Everything else in the house can. These cannot.

Decide these first, not last

The instinct is to leave the big things until the end because they are obvious and immovable and you know where they are.

That is exactly backwards. Small items have many possible destinations and short lead times. Large items have few destinations and long ones. A piano that needs a specialist mover, or a pool table that needs to be disassembled by someone who knows how, is a scheduling problem, and scheduling problems need runway.

Make the list in the first week. Ten items, probably fewer. Then work each one to a decision before you touch a single drawer.

Measure the path, not the room

This is the error that produces the memorable disasters.

People measure the item and they measure the destination room, confirm it fits, and stop. The item then arrives at the new house and gets as far as a landing.

What actually decides feasibility is the PATH. The narrowest doorway. The turn at the top of the stairs. Whether a door can be removed at the hinge to gain the extra inches. Ceiling height on a staircase, which is what stops long items more often than width. The gate to the back yard, for anything going around rather than through. Whether the truck can get close, which on some streets it cannot.

Measure the tightest point on the route and compare it to the item's smallest cross-section, which is often on its side or on its end rather than upright.

And find out how it came in. On older Claremont homes the answer is occasionally that it came in before a wall or a window existed, and that is worth discovering now rather than on moving day. The general method for furniture fit is in will the sofa fit.

The piano deserves its own paragraph

It is the item people most expect to place easily and most often cannot.

Uprights and older console pianos are difficult to give away. Institutions and schools are frequently offered more than they can take. That is a fact about the market rather than a reflection on the instrument, and it lands hard on people who have carried a family piano through four decades.

What tends to work: ask the specific person you have in mind, early and directly, and accept the answer. Ask a local technician or tuner, who often knows who is looking. Consider that a piano nobody plays has been furniture for some years, and giving it a good end is not a betrayal.

What tends not to work: assuming a general donation route exists, and waiting until the final month to find out.

A grand, a genuinely good instrument, or one somebody in the family plays is a different case. Those move. They move with a specialist, they cost what they cost, and they should be booked well in advance.

Pool tables, safes, and things assembled in place

A slate pool table is not furniture, it is components, and it needs to be taken apart and reassembled by someone who does that work. Moving one intact is how they get damaged and how people get hurt.

A safe is a floor-loading and access question as much as a weight question, and the destination needs to be able to take it.

Anything built in place, a workbench, shelving, a closet system, generally does not leave. Decide whether it stays with the house as an improvement or comes out before listing. Half-removed built-ins are worse than either.

Sell, donate, or hand on: a realistic view

Large items sell slowly, and they sell to people who must be able to collect them, which narrows the field considerably.

If you intend to sell, start early enough that the timeline is not doing the negotiating for you. Items listed in the last fortnight of a move get sold at whatever the deadline dictates.

If you intend to donate, confirm in advance that the organization takes that category and that they collect. Many will not take large furniture, and a great many will not take anything upholstered.

And if a family member is going to have it, get a real answer with a real date, not an intention. The gap between someone saying they would love the dining table and someone arranging to collect the dining table is where an enormous amount of downsizing stress lives. Handling that conversation properly is covered in dividing heirlooms without a family argument.

Selling the house with them in it

Sometimes the right answer is that the item stays.

A pool table in a room built around it, or a large piece that suits the house, occasionally reads as a feature rather than a leftover, and some buyers are glad of it. This has to be handled deliberately as part of the transaction rather than assumed, and it should be discussed with your agent rather than decided on the last day.

What does not work is leaving things behind by default because they were too hard to deal with. That is a different thing and buyers can tell the difference. The broader version of this decision, including furnished sales, is in sell, donate, keep.

The short version

Make the list of oversized items in week one. Ten items or fewer, and they will account for most of your difficulty.

For each one: measure the path at its narrowest point, not the room. Find the destination and get a real commitment with a date. Book any specialist well ahead. And be honest about which of these you actually want in the next house, as opposed to which you feel obliged to keep.

The rest of the sequence sits at the Claremont downsizing hub.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.