How to Move Heavy Furniture: 7 Tips to Keep You Safe
Save your belongings and your back with the following tips
Moving heavy furniture isn’t a task to take lightly. While it’s tempting to roll up your sleeves and get it done, learning how to move heavy furniture properly is essential for safety and damage prevention. By following proper lifting techniques, using the right tools, and planning ahead, you can prevent personal injuries, protect the furniture, and ensure there’s no collateral damage to your home. Use these seven tips to move heavy furniture safely.
Why It’s Important to Move Heavy Furniture Safely
One of the most important reasons to move heavy furniture safely is to avoid personal injuries. Improper lifting and carrying techniques can strain your back, shoulders, and other muscles, potentially resulting in serious injuries.
It’s also crucial for protecting the furniture: If you don’t have a good handle on it, you might drop, bump, or ding the furniture, and that’s certainly not something you want to happen. Plus, when furniture is improperly lifted or dragged across floors, it can cause scratches, dents, and other damage to your home. Protect your flooring when moving by following these guidelines for transporting heavy furniture.
1. Enlist Professional Help
Before moving heavy furniture, it’s best to enlist help from your friends, family members, or, the best option, professional movers. The safest option is to hire professional furniture movers to move furniture in or out of your house. Consider this step mandatory if you’re moving the heavy furniture up any stairs or tight stairways. Don’t try to push yourself—we don’t recommend moving heavy furniture on your own.
2. Disassemble Whenever Possible
It’s always easier to move smaller and less bulky pieces, so it’s worth the effort to disassemble your furniture where possible. Unscrew and remove wobbly dresser mirrors, and remove drawers to make the piece much easier to move. Additionally, certain furniture items like dining tables, couches, larger desks, or dressers may have detachable legs, so it helps to remove these, too. Be sure to store the pieces together and label them properly to make reassemble easier.
3. Clear the Pathway
Another important prep step is clearing the pathway to your moving truck of any furniture, personal belongings, and other potential obstacles. If you need to move the furniture through doorways, narrow stair landings, or other tight spaces, measure them to ensure it will fit through. If not, you may need to remove doors from the hinges or consider different lifting angles to make it fit.
4. Use Proper Lifting Techniques
Once you’re ready to lift, get a comfortable and secure grip on the furniture that allows your palms (not your fingers) to do most of the heavy lifting. Then, bend your knees, keep your back straight, and lift with your legs to avoid straining your back. Again, this process can cause personal injuries, so it’s best to hire professional movers who have the skills and experience necessary to tackle this task.
5. Use Furniture Sliders
If you only need to move a piece of heavy furniture to a new spot on the same floor, slightly lift one side of the furniture and slide a furniture slider under each leg. Ensure the smooth side faces the ground while the padded side faces the furniture's legs for optimal grip. With the sliders in place, you should be able to easily push the furniture to its destination. Always apply pressure from the lower section to prevent tipping or other mishaps.
6. Hire Specialized Help for Specialty Items
Some large, bulky items require specialized professional help to move them safely. These items can include pianos, pool tables, grandfather clocks, gun safes, and more.
If you’re moving a piano, a professional piano mover can ensure it gets done without damaging the instrument. The average piano moving cost is between $260 and $580. If you’re worried about transporting your valuable piano, hire these specialists to ensure it arrives safely.
7. Use Moving Straps
While moving straps are frequently used for moving heavy appliances like washers and dryers, you can use them to move bulky furniture, too. Moving straps, known as furniture-lifting straps, help to distribute the weight of the heavy item more evenly, making it easier to carry onto a moving vehicle. These helpful tool costs $25 to $40, depending on the brand and model.
Alison Kasch contributed to this piece.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, in most cases, you can use furniture sliders on carpeting. However, it’s best to seek out furniture sliders that are specifically meant for carpeting, or a larger size of slider that the furniture won’t slip off of as easily. Many varieties of furniture sliders are versatile enough to use on carpeting, hardwood, or tile floors.
It’s typically not advisable to move heavy furniture by yourself. However, if you are confident that you can do it safely, there are several different tools you can use, including a hand truck, a four-wheel dolly, or an appliance dolly. If you’re moving furniture upstairs or downstairs, a hand truck is the most suitable choice. Regardless of what you choose to use, always ensure that the furniture is well-balanced and secure by using lifting straps or tie-down straps to keep it in place.
If you don’t want to purchase furniture sliders, there are several household items that can be used as makeshift sliders. Thick towels or blankets placed under furniture legs can reduce friction and make it easier to slide the furniture without causing damage to the floor. Additionally, plastic or paper plates can be placed under each leg for easy sliding. You can also cut up pieces of a cardboard box to slide beneath the legs of the furniture.