How to Get an Accurate Single-Item Quote

Single-item jobs are the easiest thing to quote badly, because a description like a large dresser covers an enormous range of realities. Here is what to send.

Just-In-Time Moving handles single items across Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County.

The photographs

The item itself, from the front and from the side, ideally with something for scale.

The staircase, if there is one, including the turn and the landing. This is the single most useful photograph and the one people never send. A written description of a staircase is almost worthless; a photograph answers everything at once.

The doorway the item has to come through, particularly interior doors, which in older houses here are narrower than the front door.

The approach, from where a truck can park to the entrance. Steps, a slope, gravel, a long path.

The same at the other end if it is going to a different address. People reliably photograph their own end and forget the destination.

The measurements

The item: height, width and depth, and for a sofa the diagonal depth, because it is the diagonal that has to get round a turn.

The narrowest point of the route: not the front door, the tightest thing anywhere on the journey. Often an interior doorway or the gap at the top of a staircase.

If those two numbers are close, say so explicitly. Two inches of clearance and one inch of interference are completely different jobs and we would rather tell you honestly before the day.

The things worth mentioning unprompted

Whether the piece was assembled inside the room, because if it was it may not come out whole and we will arrive planning to take it apart.

Whether it is old, valuable or sentimental. It changes the handling and it is the thing most often left unsaid.

Whether it is a sleeper sofa, which is far heavier than it looks.

Whether anything is already loose at the joints, which is common on pieces that have moved before and matters when it is lifted.

Send all that and the quote you get is a real one.

The reason it is worth the ten minutes is the same reason it is worth photographing a spa route: where a company cannot see the job, the sensible thing for them to do is price the harder version of it. They have to allow for the doorway being narrower than described and the staircase having a turn nobody mentioned. Giving them the actual picture removes that allowance. It is one of the few situations where volunteering more information reliably produces a lower number.

Call (435) 862-3080 or email office@movingjustintime.com.