Moving Heavy Furniture – Sometimes DIY Is Really Best

At Homefixated, we try not to bad-mouth products and instead focus our attention on items and ideas that you might actually get some use out of. We’ll be doing that in this post but I will also take a bit of a swipe – without naming names – at something I bought that proved to be an epic piece of fail if there ever was one. Hopefully anyone who has to move and slide heavy furniture around (particularly on surfaces like hardwood floors that you don’t want to scratch) will learn a thing or two.

This past month when we decided to remove our damaged engineered hardwood and replace it with tile, we had to get a bunch of furniture out of the way first. One of these pieces of furniture was a mammoth stand-alone pantry that weighs exactly 5 billion pounds. When we eventually move from our home, we’re going to have to take it apart in order to get it out, but for a job like this where we only really had to move it about 20 feet, we were feeling lazy and wanted to get it out of the way intact. When eating copious amounts of spinach in the hopes of gaining an unnatural amount of muscle in a very short period of time didn’t work, we started looking into other options.

And then like some miracle we saw an infomercial trumpeting the very thing we needed. Here we saw little old ladies using the product to move chairs and bookcases and even a car out of the way. The item they were using consisted of a little “lifter” that you could wedge underneath a corner of your heavy object. With it lifted a couple inches off the ground, you then stuck a special “sliding pad” beneath your item. You do this until you have all four corners or legs resting on top of the pads. You can then just glide your piece of furniture along your floor as if you were dancing with Fred Astaire.

I was sceptical, of course, and so instead of ordering it online I asked my husband to go to the store to see if he could take a look at it in person first. If it looked cheap he shouldn’t bother picking it up. Unfortunately, I don’t think my husband heard that last part and brought it home anyway.

I knew when I saw it that it could pose a problem. First, the product had the ‘word’ “EZ” in its name. It’s almost a given that if something is called “EZ”, it’s made for gullible idiots. Second, the material that was to glide across the floor was made of a cheap, molded plastic. Our wood flooring was incredibly sensitive and would scratch if we moved even a plastic-footed chair along it. I wasn’t convinced that this plastic wouldn’t do the same. And so, we decided to do a test.

Using the lifter (which eventually snapped, so much for that), we got the pantry up onto the pads and then pushed the piece of furniture along the wood that was going to be removed anyway to see if any scratches or marks would be left behind. The result? It was like a jungle cat had come in and dragged its claws across our floor. Just Grrrrrreat!

But you know what does work well for moving a heavy object skid-mark free? An old beach towel! Just place it underneath your item so that you have enough material to still hold onto (presuming you can lift your piece of furniture up a touch and wiggle it under there. Not to bad of a job with two people, but if on your own, you might want to consider a simple wedge). You can then just drag your item where you need it to go. Of course, make sure your floor (and the towel) are both completely clean, or else your soft towel can start to function like sandpaper too.

Maybe I should team up with the Sham-Wow guy to promote the EZ Glide Towel System?