Protecting Hardwood Floors When Moving
Newly-installed or newly-varnished hardwood floors need to be protected from foot scuffs and furniture scraping or gouging during the move. Main path areas and set-down spots for the furniture all need to be protected because floor damage can easily occur when moving, and that damage can be extremely expensive to repair.
Don’t ask your moving people to remove their shoes when moving things because of the danger of personal injury to their feet. There are cloth shoe booties that can be obtained from some larger hardware stores but they can cause a mover to slip in certain situations so be careful when using them.
The best protection is to roll out rubber-backed runners because they won’t slip under the movers’ feet and they won’t damage the floor. However, those runners are expensive and hard to find.
More easily accessible, but not as good, would be your rented furniture pads which can be laid out on the floor and moved, but they can slip and slide under the movers’ feet so care must be taken when traversing them. The same holds true for painter’s (cloth or plastic) drop cloths which can be purchased at paint stores. Plastic drops cloths should be of a very heavy thickness so that they won’t tear.
Furniture glides (furniture sliders) made out of Teflon are wonderful to put under furniture so that big furniture pieces can be slid easily around the room without damaging hardwood floors. Just be careful to not let any of them get loose from the furniture piece in the process!
Also, felt kits can be obtained from any hardware store. These have felt pieces of various sizes and shapes that can be stuck to the bottom of furniture legs. These work well at first but over time they can come unglued or wear out, so watch out for that.
Protecting Hardwood Stairs
Hardwood stairs are difficult to protect without risking foot slippage on anything used to cover them. The only thing that we have so far found that works well is the rubber-backed floor runner shown in the picture above.
Protecting Hardwood Railings and Bannisters
Simply place pads on your railings and banisters and tape them together with mover’s tape but tape them to the banisters, walls, floors with blue painter’s tape. Again, the painter’s tape will not leave residue on surfaces but mover’s tape will, so only use mover’s tape to tape one pad to another.
Any accidental damage to your hardwood floors during the move will burden your moving budget even more. In fact, paying for untimely floor damage would be the last thing you’d want to do during that tough transitional period. So, eliminate any chances of damaging your hardwood floors by hiring experienced movers.
