Stairs, Houseboats and No Lift

The canal ring was built for people who did not own furniture and did not expect to live past sixty. The staircases reflect that. Seventy degrees, half a foot deep, occasionally with a rope instead of a banister.

None of this is an obstacle. Therapists working this city climb those stairs several times a night and have opinions about which streets are worst. It only becomes an obstacle when nobody mentioned it, because then the assumption was a lift and the arrival window was built around one.

Say whether there is a lift

Six words in the booking message. "Third floor, no lift" is complete information and it changes nothing about the price, the availability or the arrival window. It changes what happens in the last ninety seconds.

Buildings from the 1600s do not have lifts. Buildings from the 1990s usually do. Buildings from the 1970s might have one that stops at the fourth floor and leaves a half-flight above it, which is the case most worth flagging because it looks like a lift building from the street.

Attics, sloped ceilings and the top of the house

Top-floor rooms in canal houses are frequently the nicest rooms in the building and frequently the strangest shape. A sloped ceiling is fine. A beam at head height is fine. What matters is whether there is standing room on at least one side of the bed, and in almost every attic flat there is.

If you are genuinely unsure, describe the room in one line rather than measuring it. "Attic, sloped roof, bed under the window" tells us everything. It is the kind of detail that gets sorted out in the same ten minutes as the confirmation rather than at the door.

Houseboats

Houseboats are a normal booking and an abnormal address.

The number on a houseboat refers to the quay, not to a building you can see, and the boats are not always in numerical order. There is often no buzzer. There is sometimes a locked gate at the top of the gangplank. After dark, half of them have no light on the approach at all.

So the message wants three things instead of one: the quay and number, then a physical description, then a plan for the last ten metres. Something like a black hull with a white deckhouse, third from the bridge, knock on the side door. That is enough. A therapist standing on a dark quay comparing hull colours is a therapist not yet inside.

If there is a gate code, send the code. If the gangplank is slippery in rain, that is worth knowing too. The bag has to come across it.

The other awkward entrances

Courtyard buildings and hofjes with a street gate that locks at a fixed hour. Interior doors in older blocks that need a second key. Shared halls where the bikes are stacked two deep and the front door only opens to forty-five degrees. Bed-and-breakfast rooms above a shop with a separate street door that has no sign on it.

All of these are ordinary. All of them are two minutes each if they are a surprise and zero minutes if they are in the message.

None of it changes the booking

This is the part worth being clear about. A fourth-floor walk-up in the Jordaan is the same price as a ground-floor flat with a lift, and the same twenty-to-thirty-minute window. There is no access surcharge, no stairs surcharge and no travel charge anywhere inside the ring. The whole outcall model is built on the therapist absorbing the journey, and the last flight of stairs is part of the journey.

What the information buys is punctuality, not cheapness. Every one of these details is the difference between an arrival at the top of the window and an arrival at the bottom of it. The booking guide sets out the whole message, but if you remember one thing, remember the floor number.