Guides / What a split-level hides
What a split-level hides
The Forest's signature house was built into its slope on purpose: the builders of the seventies stepped the floor plan down the block instead of flattening it. Fifty years later those houses are full, and what they are full of is exactly what a blind quote never sees.
The hiding places, counted
- The half-flights. A split-level rarely has "stairs" in the way a two-storey does; it has three or four short runs of six or seven steps, each with its own landing and its own tight turn. Every one is a slow-down a flat-house estimate never included. They are fine; they just have to be counted.
- The under-house level. Step the floors down a slope and you create a void underneath, and no Forest household has ever left a void empty. Benches, board bags, camping gear, the archive boxes from two jobs ago. It is routinely a truck-load on its own.
- The garage that is not just a garage. Built under or beside the house, half workshop, half museum. The garage is where quotes go to die; ours asks about it by name.
- The rumpus, two half-flights down. The pool table went down there in 1998 through a door that has since gained a deck. Getting it out is a job we plan with fresh eyes, not a shrug.
- The piano problem. Uprights live on split-levels' middle floors everywhere in the Forest. A piano is never an extra line on a quote; it sets who carries, what gear comes, and which route wins. Tell us early, always.
How to count yours honestly
Walk the house once with a notepad, going level by level, and write down three numbers: the number of half-flights between the lowest loaded room and the truck, the number of rooms below street level, and the number of things you privately suspect will not fit through the door they came in through. Those three numbers, given on the callback, do more for the accuracy of your hours estimate than any bedroom count.
Or answer the Carry Plan's five questions and let it do the arithmetic on crew for you.
Why we crew up rather than gear down
The honest answer to a split-level is hands: a third or fourth mover so the half-flights become a relay instead of a grind. That is why a full split-level move usually runs with 3 movers + 1 truck at $350 an hour, and the big ones with 4 movers + 2 trucks at $500. More hands, fewer hours, and nobody carrying a sideboard alone on step six of seven.
