When moving out of a rented house or apartment, then scratched, chipped, or dented floors, as well as property damage to any other parts of the residence, may result in you NOT getting your security deposit back and you paying for any needed repair work caused by negligence.
Moreover, untimely damage when moving out of your own home will decrease its sale price, and again – you’ll probably need to cover the repair costs out of your own pocket.
Similarly, any ruined floors of the new house or apartment during the move-in process will definitely be a bad way to begin your post-move period.
So, no matter how you look at it, one thing is perfectly clear – you need to be familiar with the best way to protect floors when moving home.
Moving home is an expensive affair as it is, and damaged floors due to incorrect or unsafe moving of heavy furniture will only put additional strain on your family budget. Be proactive and avoid costly property damage during your residential move.
Here are 12 tried-and-true floor protection tips to help you protect floors when moving house.
Why should you care about protecting floors when moving home?
Obviously, damaged floors – regardless of whether the flooring is made up of hardwood, tiles, laminate, vinyl, or carpets – are a type of property damage that can prove to be too costly for you. Unless you wish to make your life even harder and more complicated with
additional repair costs (as if your moving costs weren’t high enough!),
precious time lost forever (as if your move didn’t cost you enough time already!), and
shattered nervous system (as if the home moving process weren’t one of life’s most stress-inducing events!),
floor damage must be avoided at all costs irrespective of whether that property is the one you’re moving out of or the one you’re moving into. Both scenarios will cause you additional troubles during a tough relocation period where TROUBLE is the last thing you want to hear.
How to protect floors during a move – 12 floor-protection measures
Now that you understand the importance of good floor protection, let’s turn our attention to the various protective measures, safety techniques, and tips to keep all floors in your home damage-free.
Here, we’re offering as many as 12 tried and tested tips for protecting floors when moving house.
1. Carry lighter items
Regardless of the floor protection you’re using /read on to find out more/, you should never drag any heavy furniture pieces across the floor because the delicate surfaces of most types of flooring can be easily damaged – scratches or dents in wood floors, or broken tiles on tiled floors may soon appear to dampen your home moving mood.
The very first thing you can do to keep your floors intact is to carry in your own arms any items that are light enough to be hauled around comfortably – anything from lightweight cardboard boxes to not-so-heavy furniture pieces (chairs, for example).
The basic idea here is that floors cannot sustain any damage if no items come into direct contact with them during the house-moving process.
2. Pack with safety in mind
Double-tape all your cardboard boxes so that you can prevent floor damage from heavy or sharp objects breaking free from their containers.
You may wonder for a second there how the home packing process can actually help you avoid costly damage to your floors. The answer is easy enough:
Wrap the edges and feet of tables and chairs with furniture blankets – that protective measure will protect wooden floors if a furniture piece is dropped on them.
Use high-quality cardboard boxes that won’t break under the weight of their content. Items being dropped onto floors is one of the most common reasons for damaged flooring when moving to a new home.
If you’ve decided to get your hands on free moving boxes to minimize the skyrocketing moving costs, like you should, make sure you select only strong containers with no previous damage of any kind.
Double-tape the bottoms of all packing boxes for extra protection.
Never pack boxes beyond the reasonable weight limit of about 20 pounds per box.
Another good way to protect your floors when moving is to measure your large and heavy furniture pieces before deciding to take them with you. What’s the main reason behind the idea of knowing in advance whether those pieces will fit safely into your new home?
If you do try to force a large furniture piece through a tighter doorway, you may drop that couch, desk, table, or whatever it is that you’re attempting to squeeze in, and cause considerable damage to the floor as a result.
Also, trying hard to get into position a furniture piece that is obviously too large to fit its new-home spot can lead to lost time and potentially scratched or scraped floors.
Arguably, the best way to protect hardwood floors when moving furniture, appliances, or any other super heavy household item you own, is to purchase and use furniture sliders – flat pieces of strong plastic with fitted hard rubbers that minimize or even eliminate the friction between the heavy object and the delicate floor.
When you’re about to move a couch or a bed along hardwood, tiled, or carpeted floors, simply place a furniture slider under each leg of the heavyweight item to slide the furniture safely across the floor and towards the doorway as if it were on a pair of skis. Whenever possible, remember to push heavy objects, not pull them.
If you can’t spare the money to purchase furniture sliders from a local moving company or a home goods store, it’s time to get creative! Luckily, there are a number of alternatives to those sliders – one is to use 4 pieces of protective furniture blankets – one for each leg, while the other is to utilize sheets of thick cardboard.
Using an appliance dolly with clean rubber wheels is an excellent way to keep your floors damage-free.
How to protect hardwood floors when moving home? This one is easy enough: use wheels – probably the greatest invention in human history. In fact, the correct type of moving equipment will make a world of difference when it comes to floor protection techniques.
In other words, use an appliance dolly with 2 wheels (a hand truck) or a furniture dolly with 4 wheels that, together with sliders, will keep your floors from getting damaged during the moving process.
Make sure the moving dolly you’ve rented from a local mover or purchased from a home depot store has rubber wheels and not metal ones that can scratch the floor. Practically, soft rubber wheels won’t cause any damage to your precious floors, but make sure those tires are clean too.
6. Place doormats
You should be extra careful to prevent damage to your floors whenever the weather is bad, especially when it’s raining or snowing outside. Why? Human feet can easily introduce water, mud, or even salt into the carpets or bare floors of your home, and might ruin them forever.
Floor damage to the floor aside, wet spots may cause you or anyone else involved in the move to slip and fall while carrying something fairly heavy. And that misstep alone may bring about serious personal injuries that are perfectly preventable with a few simple steps.
Place one large doormat before the front entrance, and one big doormat right after the main door so that anyone who’s about to enter your home can wipe off their shoes. Even if the meteorological conditions outside are fine, you should still have doormats to keep dust and debris from making their way into the residence.
If you’re really serious about protecting floors on Moving day, then you should consider encouraging people who enter your home to wear shoe covers (aka shoe booties). Combined with door mats placed at strategic entrance points, using inexpensive disposable shoe covers will really help keep water, dust, dirt, and other debris from dirtying up your carpeted floors or staining hardwood, tiled, laminate, or vinyl floors.
Disposable shoe covers are really cheap, so you should purchase a big pack of them to be used on Moving day. It’s worth asking your movers to wear them as well, although you may find that some moving professionals are likely to be genuinely surprised by your request for that extra floor protection you seek.
8. Utilize old blankets or rugs
No matter what type of floors you have, it’s always a good idea to use some sort of covering to create a protective pathway through your home. Cover your hardwood or carpeted floors to achieve two goals at the same time: keeping dirt and water away, and protecting the delicate surfaces against dents, scrapes, and scratches.
Moving day is the perfect time to make use of old blankets or rugs that have served you well through the years – the ones you’ve been thinking of replacing for quite some time now. For excellent floor protection, position such old blankets and area rugs along the walkways that will see the busiest traffic on Moving day.
If necessary, use appropriate fixators to make sure the temporary floor protection created by the (furniture) blankets and rugs won’t move or slide around, increasing the chance of slip-and-fall types of accidents.
Cardboard is cheap, versatile, and provides excellent protection for your floors. You get the idea, don’t you?
Without a doubt, one of the best ways to protect floors during a move is to use the unmatched versatility of cardboard to your clear advantage. But how, you may wonder.
Place large sheets of thick cardboard along heavy traffic areas during the move-out and move-in days. Cardboard boasts really good protective qualities, but that’s not all – getting your hands on pieces of cardboard should be the easiest part.
You surely have a number of cardboard boxes that are not good enough to be used for packing, so all you need to do is break them apart and use the cardboard material to keep dirt and mud out of your delicate floor.
Does cardboard scratch hardwood floors? Not really. Corrugated cardboard of good quality can be used as an alternative to furniture sliders (see above), and it will even create temporary floor protection against furniture dolly wheels loaded with heavyweight household items.
Another good way to protect new floors when moving home is to use floor runners – self-adhesive coverings made of neoprene or carpeting. Top-quality floor runners also have a non-slip surface on the bottom so that these floor protectors will not move or slide when used on Moving day.
How to protect wood stairs when moving?
Floor runners for moving, sold on large rolls from online retailers or at packaging supply stores, are perfectly suitable for protecting stairs as well – the home areas where potential slips can prove to be very dangerous.
The only real disadvantage of using floor runners is that you will need to purchase them, so if your moving budget is really tight, you’d be better off using thick pieces of cardboard that you will have for free from the packing process.
11. Use carpet masking
How to protect carpet and carpeted floors during a move?
Without a doubt, the best way to protect your carpets when moving is to roll them up and remove them (if at all possible) before the moving day action gets underway. With carpet-free floors, you have various options for effective floor protection (see above).
If removing your carpets is not a viable option, then you can choose to use carpet masking – a self-adhesive carpet film that will create a dependable layer of protection against dirt, mud, and water. Carpet film protectors are super easy to install and have tear-free and non-slip surfaces that grip well in order to prevent accidental slips.
However, similar to floor runners, carpet masking does not come cheaply and you may not be willing to spend money on moving day floor protection when the latter can be achieved with very little money or at no costs at all.
The best way to protect carpets when moving is to remove them prior to Moving day.
If you’re not too worried about your moving budget and the floor protection of your new home is a top priority, then you can choose to use sheets made of plywood as the ultimate protector for your floors in your current or new homes.
Plywood sheets can be used for creating a second floor over the current flooring as a temporary yet effective cover for your floors and carpets. In reality, no damage of any kind can be inflicted on the primary floor when plywood is used – no scratches, no dents, no scrapes, no nothing.
Once the relocation job is completed, remove the plywood sheets to reveal a perfectly 100% safe home floor.
As you can imagine, plywood sheets are expensive but under specific circumstances, they can be easily worth every penny you have invested in them.
A word of advice: do not use sheets of plywood as furniture sliders as they can actually scratch the floor surface.
BONUS floor protection tip
Regardless of the floor protection you choose for your home, it’s important to keep in mind that having helpers you can trust is probably the best method of keeping property damage away from your doorstep.
When the dust settles, you need trustworthy professionals who have loads of previous home moving experience and understand well the challenges of keeping a home perfectly damage-free.
I wish I had read your advice to use furniture sliders when moving heavy appliances or furniture so you can get them into position without scratching any of your floors. My husband and I just finished moving into our new home and we were really excited to sit down and relax in the living room. However, we realized that there are several scratches on the hardwood floors throughout the living room and kitchen. We’ll start looking into a hardwood refinishing specialist in our area.
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I wish I had read your advice to use furniture sliders when moving heavy appliances or furniture so you can get them into position without scratching any of your floors. My husband and I just finished moving into our new home and we were really excited to sit down and relax in the living room. However, we realized that there are several scratches on the hardwood floors throughout the living room and kitchen. We’ll start looking into a hardwood refinishing specialist in our area.