Older houses, narrower stairs
Maplewood is largely pre-war housing and that is the whole story of a move here. Colonials and Victorians built in the twenties and thirties, with staircases that were designed before anyone owned a sectional sofa, third floors that started life as attics, and basements with a turn at the bottom of the stairs. The number of bedrooms tells us very little. The staircase tells us almost everything.
It is also a town people move into from Manhattan and Brooklyn as much as within, so a good share of the work is an apartment's worth of furniture arriving into a house with three times the space, or the reverse when a family downsizes out. Those are different jobs and they get estimated differently.
There are apartments and converted units around the village and the train station, and those behave more like a small building move than a house move, sometimes with a COI to arrange.
What we ask before we quote it
- Whether the third floor is finished, and how the stairs run
- What is in the basement, and whether there is a turn at the bottom
- Whether anything oversized has to come out through a window
- Whether the origin or destination is an apartment with building rules
