When ordering a new household appliance, everyone knows you should measure the place that said appliance will occupy.
It’s also a good idea to measure the width of every door opening through which it must pass in order to get there.
:smack:
My parents bought a new couch years ago and had my uncle pick it up for them so they didn’t have to wait on the delivery guy. Uncle shows up with couch and Dad goes out to help Uncle carry it in. They get the couch in the door but the couch wouldn’t fit through the doorway to the living room no matter how they tried to maneuver it.
They wound up backing up and heading back out the front door, carrying the couch around to the back of the house, where the neighbor guy saw them and came over to help. The couch only fit through the back door with the three of them pushing and pulling after Mom and I took the door off of its’ hinges.
When Mom and Dad moved out of that house the couch stayed behind.
The measuring is good advice.
When I got a new dryer a couple years ago, the delivery guys took one look and said it was not going to get into the basement (or the old one out). Sure enough, doorway was a good inch and a half, two inches too narrow.
I had to tear the damned door frame down to the poured concrete foundation and brickwork to finally get the dryer out of the backyard and into the house. I, uh, never got around to putting it all back together and there’s no door there to this day.
I once bought a Ready-To-Assemble entertainment center, and brought it home to the apartment I lived in. I built it there in the living room, and it didn’t SEEM unusually large or unwieldy at the time.
When it was time to move out, however, the movers took one look at it and said, in unison, “how did you ever get that thing in here?!”
They were right, of course… assembled, it was a good 6 inches too tall to make it down the (narrow) stairs. Disassembling it wasn’t really an option, due to the cam bolts and dowels and glue, I didn’t think it would go back together very well.
Finally the movers hit upon the idea of putting rope around it and lowering it from the upstairs balcony to the ground below. It weighed about the same as the two movers, who used themselves as anchors to keep it from plunging to the ground. Entertained all the neighbors, for sure.
It worked, though the rope dug into the finish of the entertainment center and left a very large, unsightly scar.
That’s basically where I am right now; in the middle of dismantling the door jamb in the least destructive way possible. But it seems less and less likely that I’ll be able to re-use the same trim pieces. They built the thing too damn well.
Once more unto the breach!
I’m just never getting new appliances.
That’s a good thing about renting. It’s not my problem.
Mathematicians are working on the problem. All furniture should be roughly telephone-shaped to maximize the area relative to your hallway.
Had to use a company named something like Sofa in
a Bottle to get our sofa in and out of our apartment awhile back. The thing wasn’t especially large, but the apartment entryway was at a tricky angle. They came and took it apart and reassmbled it inside, a sleeper no less. I’d had no idea such a service existed, but apparently its not that uncommon a need.
My cousin’s plans for turning Grandma’s flat into an illegal tourist apartment included “modernizing” the WC; my own plans for that flat involve buying it and using it as my home. It’s a split arrangement: the throne itself sits in a tiny room to one side of the hallway, the bathroom is across the hallway from the throne room.
I’ve discovered that one of the metrics that tell me whether a contractor is trustworthy/has a brain is their opinion on changing that WC. The best ones take one look, take out the measuring tape and go “eeeeeeee! OK, barely! But we can take it out without removing the door frame. We’ll need a special size, though, one of the smaller models.” The bad ones take half a look and propose getting a modern one without any measuring; several of them have named a popular model which wouldn’t fit through the door.
Yep, done that with a large Ikea desk. I let it convey with the house when I sold it.
Slightly off topic, but hang with me here: you guys ever go into a house and see something truly bizarre and wonder what in heck someone was thinking and how did it get that way? Remodelling gone wrong? I discovered how that sometimes happens by doing one to our current house. We had our master bedroom and bath remodelled by converting a teensy 5th bedroom to a walk in closet/sitting area. The stairs up to the bedrooms land in the middle of a hallway, the door to the teensy bedroom was just in front of the stairs and our master bedroom door was to the right as you’re coming up.
Near to the end of the remodelling I realized that we had two separate doors into our new bedroom which was odd. I started to ask the construction crew to remove and drywall over one and then realized that would cause a problem. If we removed the door in front of the stairs, you’d never be able to get furniture around the corner and into the bedroom. If we removed the other door to the right at the end of the hall, we’d have a weird, blank, dead end. So my bedroom has two separate doors. Future homeowners, hope you google and find this someday to understand how that came about! 
I once asked a buddy to help me move a sleeper-couch from the living room to the game room. My friend was not Hercules; he was a small, slim guy. He was at one end, I was at the other. I lifted my end, his end was stuck on something. We switched ends and I looked to see what the problem was. I lifted my end. His end was stuck; by stuck it turns out he just couldn’t get his end off the ground. I felt awful for him. He insisted that the couch was caught on something.
I used to help with appliance delivery in the summer and we often ran into these problems. First step was to remove the door from the hinges. Next, you remove the hinges. Next, you pry off the moldings.
If that doesn’t work, you’re stuck. However, I only can remember once when we had to remove the moldings.
Remember: if you measure and it looks like its 30 and some fraction inches, that means you order a 30 inch width unit. You could even go down to 29… but you Always Round Down.
No… Really.
Well, my moldings are toast. On the left side of the opening, anyway. With those gone I had just enough room to wrassle the 27-inch warshin’ machine through and hooked it up. Success!
Now I just have to do the dryer.
The original owner of my home had finished the basement, with a narrow door dividing the nice finished side from the part where the furnace and appliances live.
Several years later the washer and dryer gave out, along with a huge old freezer he had left there. I knew from the start that they wouldn’t fit through the doorway, since I had the forethought to measure.
Yes, I removed the door frame to the rough opening, which provided just enough space for everything to slip through. I then reinstalled the door frame with all appropriate wedges and such, replaced the trim, and painted.
Next time something breaks I’ll have to do the same procedure all over, but at least now I have practice.
In a house we previously owned there is a kitchen cabinet above the fridge. This cabinet has no bottom panel - you open the door and see the top of the fridge. You can guess why.
Wait…WHAT??!
Note to expecting parents: Set up the crib IN the room where it will reside.
I almost made the new-dad mistake of setting it up in the next room where I could spread-out better, but realized just in time that the ends were too wide to go thru the doorway.