Where we live it's in a town but not on a road. Difficult to explain to delivery companies or online retailers when ordering furniture online, but self-explanatory if you could see where we live.
It's what is known as a medieval quarter. Sounds all twee and old fashioned but in essence it's a collection of small terraced cottages on a hill, with fruit trees and small green spaces, and a series of pathways connecting them.
The cottages probably aren't that old, maybe two hundred years at the most, but they're probably built on the sites of older dwellings, and still not new enough for anybody then to have considered the needs of big clunky vans delivering furniture that has been ordered via the web.
We live as Sherpas, us folk round here. Driving as near we can to the terraces, then off loading our goods and lugging them up the pathways. I explained on the telephone after going online and finding some new furniture.
The great thing about lots of furniture retail web sites is that you can look at the products but then just telephone them to order, so as to explain any delivery notes.
I know from previous experience that delivery drivers have driven around in circles round the entire part of town that contains these terraced pathways, their SatNavs showing the delivery address but mysteriously guiding them round and round.
My next concern was to how we were actually going to get the three piece suit inside the cottage. I knew we could maneuver the sofa along the pathway, including a tricky tight corner.
I'd taken measurements of the corner; it was actually a three way junction, with two paths wide and one narrow. The narrow one led to our terrace, but by executing a three point turn including a high lift over a hedge to cut the corner, and then back up the narrow path, the sofa would be safely delivered.
Yet our front door was too narrow for the sofa to go through without it getting scraped at best, stuck at worst. Accessed through the front garden the living room window was wide enough, I guessed.
When the delivery van arrived, the sofa was carefully placed in the garden, and therefore followed a contained yet heated argument within our household on how the sofa would fit in through the living room window. I argued that it would have to be tilted at an angle, others disagreed. To avoid damaging the thing we needed to agree on how it would be carried through - it would also avoid damaging us, if we decided to continue our disagreement through the lifting procedure.
After all the trouble I'd taken to ordering our sofa and chair furniture online, getting the sofa along the last 3 yards of its journey seemed an incredible task. It's not about choosing furniture online that's the problem; it's deciding how to move it into your house.
By Sarah Maple