Two objects, one page. What actually happens to a grand piano before it leaves the room, and what a half-tonne safe does to a first-floor joist.
Moving a piano and moving a safe are the two jobs customers ask us about most, and they are the two that people most often misjudge. Both are dense rather than merely heavy, both concentrate their weight on a very small footprint, and both punish improvisation. This page deals with those two objects only, in the detail a survey would go into: what your instrument actually is, what comes off it before it leaves the room, why the tuner does not come the same week, what a safe does to a domestic floor, and the point at which the honest answer is a crane or a structural engineer rather than another pair of hands.
If you have a mixed bag of difficult items — stone fireplaces, hot tubs, gym rigs, a pool table — the broader guide to moving heavy and awkward items is the right starting point. For the instrument itself, our piano moving service sets out how we quote it.
People describe their piano by the room it sits in rather than by its type, and the two are not related. Before you ask anyone to quote, establish which of four things is in your house, because the handling, the crew size and the price all follow from it.
An upright stands vertically with the strings running up and down behind the front panel. It ranges from a small spinet at roughly waist height to a full-size overstrung upright that comes up past shoulder height, and it sits at 150–250kg depending on the frame. Measure its height at the back and its depth from the wall to the front of the keys; those two numbers, plus whether it has a full iron frame, tell an experienced mover most of what they need to know.
A baby grand is the horizontal instrument up to around five feet nine from keyboard to tail. A grand runs from there to around seven feet, and a concert grand beyond that. The whole family runs 250–500kg, and the length is the number the mover wants, measured along the case from the front edge of the keyslip to the furthest point of the tail, not from the bench to the wall.
The distinction matters because a baby grand and a full grand are handled identically but need very different amounts of turning room. A six-foot case cannot be pivoted in a small hall, and it is the pivot — not the doorway width — that usually stops a grand getting out. Take a tape measure to your narrowest turn: the diagonal across the corner, floor to ceiling on any stairwell, and the clear width between the newel post and the wall. Those three figures decide more piano moves than anything else.
Digital pianos and stage pianos are a different job again, closer to moving a sideboard with electronics in it than to moving an instrument. They still deserve a proper wrap, and the same rules about not laying anything on its back apply, but they do not need a specialist crew.
A grand piano does not travel on its own legs and it does not travel the right way up. It travels on its bass side, on a padded board, with three legs and the pedal lyre packed separately. Explaining that in advance saves a lot of alarm on the morning, because to an owner it looks like the crew is tipping the instrument over.
The sequence is always the same. The lid is closed and locked, the music desk removed, the keyboard lid secured. The lyre — the pedal assembly hanging beneath the keyboard end — comes off first, because it is the most fragile part of the whole instrument and the easiest to snap with a knee. It is usually held by two or three bolts plus a pair of dowels, and on older instruments the bolts have not been touched since the piano was built, so they come out slowly. The lyre is then wrapped on its own and travels flat in the lorry, never attached.
The board goes against the bass side of the case, padded, and the piano is tilted onto it while the crew supports the treble side. With the weight on the board, the bass leg is unbolted, then the piano is rolled and the remaining two legs come off in turn. Each leg is wrapped individually. On a grand, the legs are structural, not decorative — they are what the case sits on and they carry the string tension through the rim — so they are never used as handles and never left on for the journey.
The wrapped instrument is strapped to the board, the board goes onto a heavy four-wheeled skate, and from that point the piano moves as a single tall narrow object rather than a wide flat one. That change of shape is the whole point of the exercise: on its side, a seven-foot grand fits through doors and round corners that it could never negotiate the other way up.
Reassembly reverses it in the destination room, on the exact spot where the piano is going to live, because you do not want to move it again once the legs are back on. Allow the crew half an hour at each end for the disassembly and rebuild, and expect them to check the lyre bolts twice before the pedals are used.
Uprights are simpler but not simple. Nothing comes off except the castors’ cups and sometimes the bottom board; the instrument is wrapped whole, tipped onto a piano trolley and moved upright throughout. The one rule that matters is that an upright never travels lying on its back — the action, the hammers and the dampers are all designed to work against gravity in one orientation, and laying the case flat lets them rest where they were never meant to.
Very little of a piano or safe move is lifting. Almost all of it is getting the load onto the right wheels and then controlling it. Four pieces of equipment do most of the work, and knowing what they do tells you a great deal about whether the firm quoting you has thought the job through.
The piano board, or skid board, is a padded plank with webbing straps that turns a grand into a rigid rectangle. It carries the case, spreads the load along the rim rather than at three points, and gives the crew something to grip that is not the instrument. A firm that does not own one is not moving your grand properly.
A skate or piano dolly is a low four-wheeled platform with heavy castors. It takes the boarded piano, or an upright, and lets two people move half a tonne across a level floor without strain. Its limitation is thresholds and carpet: soft floors and door bars are where a skate stops dead, which is why a crew will lay hardboard runs across carpeted routes before anything moves.
A stair crawler is a powered climber with rotating tracks or star wheels that walks a heavy load up or down a flight one step at a time under motor control rather than muscle. On safes it is transformative, because it removes the moment where three people are taking the whole weight on a staircase. It has real limits: it needs a straight flight or at least a generous half-landing, it needs a consistent riser height, and it needs a stair structure that can take a concentrated point load moving across it. Old cottage stairs, open-riser stairs and tight winders often rule it out.
A pallet truck comes into its own on ground-floor commercial safes and on anything crossing a warehouse or a level driveway. It is not a stairs tool and it is not a soft-ground tool; on gravel or a lawn it simply digs in, which is why crews will often lay tracking boards from the door to the tailgate before a heavy item comes out.
Beyond those, the standard fit-out on this kind of job is heavy quilted blankets and webbing rather than tape, corner protection on door frames and stair strings, hardboard or Correx over finished floors, and a tail-lift or ramps at the vehicle. If you want the detail of how the wrapping itself works, our note on pad-wrap protection covers the materials.
Every piano needs tuning after a move, and almost everyone books the tuner too early. The reason has very little to do with the journey and almost everything to do with the destination room.
A piano is a wooden structure under enormous string tension, and the soundboard and pinblock respond to humidity. Move an instrument from a centrally heated Victorian front room to a modern insulated house, or from a cottage near the sea to somewhere inland, and the timber begins taking up or giving off moisture the moment it arrives. That process is not finished in a day. Tune it on the Monday after the move and you will be paying for the same job again in a month, because the pitch will drift as the wood settles.
The usual advice is to let the instrument acclimatise in its final position for two to four weeks, then tune. Put it where it is going to live before that clock starts — not in the hall until the decorating is done. Keep it off an external wall where you reasonably can, away from a radiator, away from a south-facing window, and out of the direct path of underfloor heating or a wood burner. Those are the same conditions that keep it in tune afterwards, so it is worth deciding properly rather than twice.
Two other things change after a move and are worth checking before you conclude something is wrong. Pedals can feel different simply because the lyre has been off and back on, and a half-turn on the adjustment usually settles it — ask the tuner rather than the mover. And a piano that has stood on carpet for years and is now on hard floor will sound noticeably brighter; nothing has broken, the room has changed. A rug under the instrument brings it back if it bothers you.
If your piano has not been tuned for several years, expect the first post-move tuning to be a pitch raise rather than a fine tune, and expect it not to hold perfectly. That is a pre-existing condition surfacing, not damage in transit. We will happily recommend a tuner local to your new address, and on longer relocations — including international removals, where the climate change is far larger — we would allow longer still before the first tuning.
A safe is the one household object where the building, not the object, is the constraint. A domestic gun safe runs 80–200kg; a decent fire-and-burglary safe of modest external size can be 300kg because of the composite fill between its walls; commercial safes go past 500kg. All of that sits on a footprint about the size of a bedside table.
Domestic floors in the UK are designed for an imposed load of around 1.5 kilonewtons per square metre — roughly 150kg spread evenly across every square metre of floor, plus a margin. A 400kg safe standing on half a square metre is asking a joist to do something it was never designed for, and the fact that it has stood there for ten years without visibly failing is not proof that it was fine; timber creeps slowly. This is why the question “can you put the safe in the spare bedroom” is a building question before it is a removals question.
Three things reduce the risk, and a competent surveyor will look for all of them. Position over structure: a safe placed hard against a load-bearing wall, ideally over the wall below, puts its load where the joists are best supported, rather than at mid-span where deflection is greatest. Spreading the load: a steel plate or a sheet of structural ply under the safe distributes the weight across several joists instead of two. Direction of span: placing the safe across the joists rather than along a single one matters enormously, and you can usually work out which way they run from the floorboards or from where the ceiling below is fixed.
Ground floors on a concrete slab remove the problem entirely, which is why the sensible default for anything above roughly 250kg is a ground-floor location. Suspended timber ground floors are not the same thing as a slab — check for airbricks and a void before you assume.
Anchoring is the other half. Most insurers require a safe over a certain cash or valuables rating to be bolted down, and gun cabinets have their own statutory requirements about fixing into masonry that your local firearms enquiry officer will inspect. Neither the removal crew nor a general handyman should be deciding where those bolts go; that is a conversation with your insurer and, for firearms, with the police before move day. We will site and position a safe, and we will lift it onto whatever spreader plate has been specified, but the specification itself belongs to somebody with a duty to your policy.
Getting a safe up a domestic staircase is the single most common heavy-item request we turn down, and it is worth understanding why before you ask three firms and go with whoever says yes fastest.
The load on a staircase during a safe move is not the safe’s weight spread out. It is the safe’s weight, plus the crew, concentrated on two or three treads at a time and moving. A staircase built to carry people is not necessarily a staircase that will carry a concentrated 350kg travelling across it. Add a half-landing turn, a winder, or an open string, and the load path gets less predictable still.
The questions a surveyor works through, in order: what does the safe weigh empty, and does anyone actually know rather than guess? Is the flight straight, or does it turn? What is the clear width at the narrowest point, including the handrail and the newel? Is there a full-height half-landing with room to reposition the crawler? What is under the stairs — a cupboard, a solid wall, nothing? And what is the destination floor made of once you get there?
Where the answers are good — a straight flight, generous width, a modern build, a safe under about 250kg — a four-person crew with proper lifting gear is a controlled, unremarkable job. Where they are not, the alternatives are, in order of preference: put the safe somewhere else on the ground floor, which is almost always the right answer; get a structural engineer to look at the stairs and the destination floor and specify what needs doing; or bring the safe in through a window or a first-floor opening with lifting equipment, which is a bigger and more expensive undertaking than any of the above.
What we will not do is take a very heavy safe up a staircase on straps and optimism. That is how crews get hurt and how stair strings crack a fortnight later, and the second one is not covered by anybody’s transit insurance because it is damage to the building rather than to the goods. A firm that agrees to it on the phone without asking the six questions above has not asked them.
Emptying the safe first is not optional, incidentally. Paper, cash and documents add weight; a stack of gold coins adds a surprising amount; and nobody wants an unwitnessed transfer of valuables in the back of a lorry. Move the contents yourself, separately, and tell us the safe is empty so we can quote against a weight we can rely on. The same applies to gun cabinets, where the firearms travel with their certificate holder and never with the removal crew.
We do not publish a flat piano price, because the instrument is rarely the expensive part. What we quote against, in roughly descending order of impact, is this.
Access at both ends. A ground-floor room with a straight run to a driveway is the cheap version. Add a flight of stairs, a turn, a shared entrance, a first-floor flat or a parking restriction and the crew hours climb quickly. Two properties, two sets of access, and the worse of the two sets the crew size.
Crew size and time on site. A grand is a four-person job minimum, and the disassembly and rebuild are half an hour at each end before anything moves. A safe that needs a stair crawler is also four people. That is the biggest single line.
Equipment. A board and skates come as standard on a piano move. A powered stair crawler, ramps and tracking, or a hoist and platform for a window entry are separate items because they are hired or scheduled specifically.
Whether it rides with the house move or alone. A piano loaded as part of a full removal shares the vehicle and the journey and costs a good deal less than a dedicated single-item run to another county. If your dates allow it, put the piano on the main move.
Declared value. A named instrument or a high-value safe should be declared on the contract like any other valuable item; that is the same conversation covered on our antiques cover and vetting page.
Everything is itemised on a written quote after a survey, so you can see which of those lines is doing the damage and whether changing the destination room would change the number. We are a family-run Sussex remover, a full BAR member with deposits protected by the Advance Payment Guarantee, and the rating is 4.9/5 across 120+ independent Google reviews. Booking the survey takes ten minutes via the online form, or call 01323 848 008 and describe the staircase.
Free in-home or video survey, written fixed-price quote, BAR-protected deposit. Sussex’s family-run independent remover.
Cranes get talked about far more often than they get used. Most pianos that people assume will need one come down the stairs on a board without drama. But there is a real set of circumstances where lifting equipment is the only sensible route, and recognising them early saves a wasted booking.
For a piano, the trigger is almost always a first-floor flat with a staircase that will not take the turn. A grand on its board is tall and narrow, which solves most doorways, but it cannot bend. If the diagonal across a half-landing is shorter than the case, the piano did not come up those stairs and it will not go down them — which usually means it arrived through a window or a balcony opening, and it leaves the same way. Ask the current owner, or look for a window with a removable frame section. A specialist hoist and platform crew handles that lift, with a road closure or a parking suspension arranged in advance if the machine needs the street.
For a safe, the trigger is weight rather than shape. Anything genuinely heavy going above ground level, in a building where the staircase is not up to it, is a lifting-equipment job. In practice that means an opening large enough to take the safe, a hard standing outside for the machine, and a check that the destination floor can take the safe once it is in. All three have to be true; two out of three means the answer is a different room.
A structural check is warranted whenever a heavy item is going onto a suspended timber floor above ground level, whenever a previous owner has altered the joists (loft conversions and removed chimney breasts are the usual culprits), and whenever anyone in the chain is guessing about weight. A short visit from a structural engineer, with a written note on what spreading is required, costs a fraction of repairing a sagging first floor and is the only thing that will satisfy a building insurer afterwards.
The other case for a professional opinion is period property. Listed buildings and older Sussex cottages frequently have undersized joists, shallow staircases and floors that were never designed for anything like modern point loads, and consent may be needed for even minor work to make an installation possible. Our guide to moving into a listed building covers the permissions side. Where a survey turns up any of this, we would rather flag it eight weeks out than discover it with a lorry on the drive.
Booking your move with us is a five-step process. One: enquire via the online quote form or call our office on 01323 848 008. We’ll arrange a survey within a few working days. Two: the survey itself, usually in-home and lasting 30–90 minutes depending on the move complexity. The surveyor walks the property, photographs access points, counts cartons by size, and discusses any specialist requirements.
Three: the written quote, emailed within 48 hours of the survey. Itemised by line so you see what every cost line covers. Four: deposit and date confirmation. Typically 25% deposit on confirmation, fully protected under the British Association of Removers’ Advance Payment Guarantee. Five: the move itself. Uniformed crew, our own lorry, no agency labour, blankets washed between jobs.
For pre-move questions, our office is reachable Monday to Friday 8am to 5:30pm and Saturday 9am to 1pm. We’d rather have the customer conversation early than late — a small clarification three weeks before move day saves a meaningful misunderstanding on the day itself. For the wider company background and how the business is run, the about-us page covers it.
Two things speed this up when a piano or a safe is involved. Send photographs before the survey — the instrument or safe from the front, the room door, the hall, the stairs from the bottom and from the top, and the parking outside both properties. And find out the weight rather than estimating it: pianos usually carry a serial number inside the lid that identifies the model, and safes almost always have a plate or a manual giving the empty weight. With those two things in hand we can often tell you on the phone whether the destination room is realistic, before anybody drives anywhere.
Yes. A grand travels on its bass side on a padded piano board, with all three legs and the pedal lyre removed and wrapped separately. The legs are structural rather than decorative, and on its side the case becomes tall and narrow, which is the only way most grands get through a normal doorway or round a stair turn.
Leave it two to four weeks in its final position first. The soundboard takes up or gives off moisture as it adjusts to the new room, and tuning before that has settled means paying for the job twice. Put the instrument where it is going to live before the clock starts.
Sometimes. It depends on the empty weight, whether the flight is straight or turns, the clear width past the newel and handrail, and what the destination floor is made of. Under roughly 250kg on a straight modern flight is usually straightforward with a powered stair crawler; above that, a ground-floor position or a structural opinion is the honest answer.
It can. Domestic floors are designed for an imposed load of about 1.5 kilonewtons per square metre, and a safe concentrates several hundred kilograms onto a footprint smaller than a bedside table. Position it over a load-bearing wall, spread the load across joists with a plate or structural ply, and get an engineer's view before anything heavy goes above ground level.
Always. Contents change the weight we quoted against, and valuables should never travel unwitnessed in a removal lorry. Firearms in particular stay with their certificate holder and never with the crew. Tell us the safe is empty and give us the manufacturer's stated weight rather than an estimate.