A split-level is three jobs stacked into one
A split-level usually means a short run of stairs up to the bedrooms, another short run down to a den or garage level, and a main floor sitting between the two. Every one of those levels has its own furniture, and every staircase between them has its own turn radius. We measure the turn at the landing before we decide whether a couch goes down the stairs whole or comes apart in the garage.
We walk every staircase before the truck backs in
Before anything gets carried, Andre walks each staircase in the house and checks where the tightest turn sits, usually at the half landing between the entry and the bedroom level. A staircase that looks wide enough from the top can pinch hard at that turn, and finding that out with a couch already on someone's shoulder costs more time than finding it out first. That walkthrough also decides which two people carry which pieces.
Basements bring their own weather problem
A lot of the split-levels around Roswell and Woodstock Road have a finished basement or a lower den level, and Georgia summer humidity settles into those rooms faster than it does upstairs. Boxes that sat against a basement wall over a rainy week sometimes come up soft on one side, so we check the bottom of those boxes before we stack anything heavy on top of them in the truck.
Furniture that has to come apart to leave the house
Bunk beds and tall dressers that went into a split-level bedroom in pieces usually have to leave the same way, because the stairwell that let the frame in flat will not let it out assembled. We take those apart at the top of the stairs rather than guessing they will fit, and we bag every bolt to the piece it came from so reassembly at the new address does not turn into a search.
What changes when there is nowhere close to park
Streets in some of the older split-level neighborhoods near Roswell are narrow enough that the truck ends up half a block from the front door, which turns every trip into a longer carry. On those jobs we add a second person just to shuttle boxes from the porch to the truck, so the crew loading never waits on the crew still coming down the stairs.
The plan gets written before the first box moves
None of this gets figured out on the fly. Andre writes the level-by-level plan down on the walkthrough, so every person on the crew knows which staircase they are working before the truck door ever opens.