Once Brenda and I had discovered that the arms of Mr A's large-ish sofa folded down flat, the task of manoeuvring it out of his living room and front door became a little easier...albeit we still needed to negotiate 4 flights of stairs for it to reach ground level - thankfully Gravity had also joined us as the third member for this task, and so with a bit of caution as everything was quite narrow, we slowly allowed the sofa to make its way down each flight with a human brake at one end, and we soon had it out of the front door and parked behind the communal bins as requested.