What should be on my walkthrough checklist before I quote a downsizing job for a new client?

Your walkthrough checklist needs to capture six things before you put a number on paper: usable volume by room, the disposition load, the access path from front door to truck, the special handling items, the destination constraints, and who has authority to say yes. Miss any one of them and the estimate stops being a quote and becomes a guess you are now contractually stuck with.

Most underquoting is not a math error. It is a capture error. The sorting hours got estimated from the living room while the real work was sitting in a basement nobody opened, or the truck plan assumed a driveway that turns out to be shared and posted no parking on Tuesdays.

What follows is the sequence that works in about ninety minutes on site, plus the arithmetic for turning those notes into a number you can defend when the adult daughter in Denver asks why it costs what it costs.

Before you arrive: destination floor plan, move in date, community rules

Half the estimate is decided by the destination, and you can get most of it before you leave your office. Ask for the unit number and the floor plan name, then call the community's marketing or move in coordinator directly for the dimensioned plan. A one bedroom labeled 720 square feet in a brochure may have only one wall long enough for a queen bed, which decides the disposition load before you have looked at a single item in the house.

Get these on the phone or by email first:

• The dimensioned floor plan, including door swings, closet depths, and window heights
• Elevator dimensions and whether a service elevator must be reserved in a time block
• Approved move in days and hours, and whether weekends are excluded
• Certificate of insurance requirements: limits, additional insured wording, who it is sent to
• Loading dock or front entrance protocol, and floor protection requirements
• Whether the unit is available for pre staging the day before

The insurance requirement matters more than people expect. If the community wants two million in general liability and your policy carries one, you are either buying an endorsement or losing the job, and that is worth learning on day one rather than the week of the move.

Keep reading: What actually happens on a move day when the client has dementia and cannot decide?

Room by room volume capture and photographing access points

Walk the house once without writing anything. Then walk it again with a form. The first pass is for scale and for reading the client; the second is for the estimate.

For each room capture four numbers: cubic feet of furniture, linear feet of packable contents, count of items requiring disassembly, and an honest sorting difficulty rating. Sorting difficulty is the one that drives labor hours, and it is not correlated with volume. A china cabinet is bulky and fast. Three file drawers of paperwork, tax returns, and loose photographs are small and slow.

A simple three level rating holds up well across jobs:

Rating	What it looks like	Sorting hours per room
Light	Furniture and clearly labeled storage, decisions already made	1 to 2
Moderate	Mixed contents, some sentimental items, client present and engaged	3 to 5
Heavy	Paper, photographs, collections, deferred decisions, multiple opinions	6 to 12

Those ranges are working assumptions from typical crew pacing, not published figures. Build your own from your last ten jobs and they will be far more accurate than anything you borrow.

Photograph everything, and photograph the access points twice: once wide, once with a tape measure in frame. Doorway widths, the tightest stair turn, the porch step height, the hallway pinch point outside the master bedroom. When the crew lead asks whether the sleeper sofa clears the turn, you want a photo with a number in it, not a memory.

Stairs, driveways, parking, and truck approach

Stand in the street and look at the house the way a driver would. Where does a twenty six foot box truck actually stop? Is there a low branch, a mailbox, an overhead wire, a cul de sac with no turnaround?

Note the carry distance from the truck's realistic parking spot to the front door in feet, not in impressions. Anything over about seventy five feet changes crew pacing enough that you should price it. If the property is on a hill, or the walk crosses grass that turns soft after rain, note that too.

For condos and city properties, check for a permit requirement to hold curb space. Many municipalities require a temporary no parking permit posted a set number of hours in advance, and the fee plus the posting trip is a real line item. Ask the client which day the trash and recycling trucks come, because a cleanout dumpster and a Wednesday collection do not share a driveway well.

Keep reading: Where are senior move referrals coming from now that communities run their own move in teams?

Hidden volume: garage, basement, attic, sheds, and file cabinets

This is where estimates die. Open every door. If the client says the attic is empty, put your head through the hatch anyway, politely.

The spaces that most reliably hide volume:

1. Detached garage, especially behind the cars and up in the rafters
2. Crawl space and basement storage under the stairs
3. Garden shed and anything under a tarp along the fence line
4. The back half of every closet above shoulder height
5. File cabinets and desk drawers, which are pure sorting hours
6. A second property, a storage unit, or a relative's basement holding overflow

Ask directly: is there anything stored anywhere else that comes with this move? An off site storage unit discovered three days before move day is the single most common cause of a change order, and it is preventable with one question.

Special handling: pianos, safes, firearms, medical equipment, chemicals

These items each carry their own vendor, their own timeline, or their own legal path. Flag them at the walkthrough and price them separately or exclude them explicitly.

Items needing a specialty vendor

Upright and grand pianos, gun safes, large aquariums, hot tubs, pool tables, and anything mounted to a wall stud that will need patching. Get the make and approximate weight while you are standing there. A piano mover quotes from the model and the stair count, and you cannot get that quote from a photo of a keyboard.

Items with a legal or disposal path

Firearms are not moved by a general crew. Note the count and the type, and route the family to a licensed dealer or the appropriate state process; laws vary by state and by whether the transfer crosses state lines. Prescription medications need take back disposal rather than a trash bag. Paint, solvents, pool chemicals, propane tanks, and old pesticides go to a household hazardous waste site with its own hours and volume limits. Oxygen concentrators, hospital beds, and mobility equipment are usually rented, and the supplier picks them up on their own schedule.

Write each of these into the estimate as either a priced line, a coordinated vendor with a pass through cost, or a clearly stated exclusion. Silence in the estimate reads as included.

See how DownsizeRoute handles this for senior move management

Who decides, who pays, and who will be on site

The most expensive variable on any downsizing job is the number of people with an opinion and no deadline.

Ask, plainly and early: who is the client of record, who signs the agreement, who is paying, and who will be present on sort days and move day. If a power of attorney or trustee is involved, ask for a copy for your file. If the paying party is an adult child in another state, establish now how decisions get made when the child and the parent disagree, because they will.

Then read the room. If two siblings are already contradicting each other in front of you, add facilitation hours. That is not cynicism, it is capacity planning. A job with three engaged adult children takes longer than the same square footage with one.

Turning the walkthrough notes into a defensible estimate

Build the number from parts the client can follow. Here is a worked example using assumed rates; substitute your own market's numbers.

Assume a three bedroom ranch with a full basement, moving to a one bedroom independent living apartment. Assumptions: crew rate of 65 dollars per person hour, a three person crew, and the sorting ratings captured above.

• Sorting and decision hours: 4 rooms moderate at 4 hours, 2 spaces heavy at 8 hours, equals 32 crew hours
• Packing the keep list: 22 crew hours
• Move day labor including unpack and bed making: 24 crew hours
• Total 78 crew hours at 65 dollars, equals 5,070 dollars
• Materials: 380 dollars
• Donation runs, two loads with a box truck and driver: 600 dollars
• Estate sale or buyout: handled by a partner, netted separately, excluded from this figure
• Piano move by specialty vendor: 550 dollars pass through

That lands near 6,600 dollars, and every component is traceable to something you saw. Present it as a range, roughly plus or minus fifteen percent, with the drivers named: the volume in the basement, the paperwork in the office, and how many family members are in the room.

State your exclusions in the same document. Hazardous waste disposal, firearm transfer, real estate cleanout after closing, and anything in a storage unit not yet inspected are the four worth naming every time.

Where the checklist becomes a plan

A good walkthrough produces two artifacts: a number, and a placement plan showing what actually fits in the destination. The second one is what stops the fight over the dining set, because it answers the question with a measured wall rather than an opinion.

DownsizeRoute is built for exactly that handoff. Load the destination floor plan, place the furniture the client wants to keep against real dimensions, and let the keep and donate lists come out of the plan by room. The family sees the same drawing you do, approves it before move day, and your estimate stops being a promise and starts being a document.