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Rules of thumb, not physics: a sofa goes through a door if its DEPTH clears the opening (carried level), or its HEIGHT clears it (carried on end), with a few cm for hands and doorframe. Removable feet buy 5-10cm; taking the door off its hinges buys ~5. A turn in a hallway is where sofas actually die: retailers publish "will it fit" diagrams for exactly this. When in doubt: cardboard template, or a modular sofa.
What The Sofa Fit Calculator Works Out
- Verdict: a sofa passes a door if its depth clears the opening carried level, or its height clears it carried on end, with 3cm spare for hands and frame. A 95cm-deep, 90cm-high sofa needs a 98cm opening flat or 93cm on end, so the standard 76cm British internal door is where most sofas get stuck.
- Borderline and unlikely: within about 5cm the usual tricks (feet off, door off its hinges, packaging stripped in the van, angled through) usually get it in. Beyond that, think window delivery, a modular or sofa-in-a-box design, or a smaller frame.
- Hallway turn: the rough rule flags a corner where the corridor is more than 10cm narrower than the sofa's depth. The straight door is rarely the killer; the turn is where sofas actually die, which is why retailers publish turning diagrams.
- Your numbers: the dimensions you entered, repeated so you can check them against the retailer's packaged sizes, which are bigger than the showroom's.
- Packaging and removable feet (advanced): corner armour and boxing add a few centimetres to every side; unscrewing the feet takes 5cm to 10cm off the height. The size-as-carried card shows the dimensions that actually meet the door.
- Clearance and door off its hinges (advanced): change the 3cm hand-room assumption, and add the roughly 5cm that lifting the door off buys. These feed straight into the verdict.
- Spare room through the door (advanced): the opening minus the sofa's narrowest cross-section minus clearance. Negative means short by that much; it tells you whether feet-off alone would do it.
- Longest sofa the corner can take (advanced): the geometry of a rectangle pivoting round a right angle between two corridors (enter the second corridor's width if it differs). It is the longest sofa that clears the inner corner at every angle, worked out for carrying level and on end. The general moving sofa problem is still unsolved in mathematics; this rectangle version is exact.
- Smallest opening this sofa needs (advanced): the narrowest cross-section plus clearance, to compare against every pinch on the route: door widths at the handles, radiators, bannisters and the low light fitting. Twenty minutes with a cardboard template beats any amount of optimism, and failed-delivery restocking fees turn geometry errors into cash ones.