How to Protect Furniture When Moving

When was the last time you heard somebody say, “It’s better to be safe than sorry”?

If you haven’t heard this for a while, keep your ears open the next time you’re about to move house.

To protect your furniture when moving, you’ll need to go through several preparation stages to make sure your pieces will be as safe on the road as they can be.

Due to their bulkiness and weight, your furniture pieces will need special handling and even more special protection – after all, they can’t be just packed up in cardboard boxes and loaded onto the waiting moving vehicle like the rest of your possessions.

Luckily, if you follow the furniture protection stages described below, there’s a high chance that you won’t have to face and later deal with any issues during your residential move.

Trust us – additional problems such as broken or ruined pieces of furniture or even damage to your home are the last thing you would want on your moving day.

The first 3 stages will explain how to prepare furniture for moving, while the final 4th stage will be all about how to pack furniture when moving house.

You may also like to read: How to Protect Walls, Ceilings, Floors, Stairs, and Doors When Moving Home. Just as important as protecting your furniture during the move is to protect your old and new home. A dented wall or scratched wooden floor would be costly and inconvenient to have to repair. This guide tells you all you need to know about protecting your home during a move.

#1 Get Furniture Protection Materials

What is the best way to protect furniture when moving? Using the proper packing material for moving furniture, of course.

All in all, here’s what you will need to best protect your furniture when moving house:

Moving blankets

When it comes to keeping wood or leather furniture safe during a move, specialised moving blankets provide the best protection imaginable for your fragile pieces.

The truth is that their soft thickness and large cover area serve two distinct yet equally important purposes – excellent protection of the pieces wrapped up in them and superior safeguard of the most damage-susceptible spots in your home. And that double protection alone is something that other packing supplies can rarely offer.

Alternatively, if you don’t think purchasing or renting suitable moving blankets is worth the investment, you can instead use the ordinary blankets or coverings that you happen to have in your home.

Be mindful, though, that the unpredictability of a house move could ruin your home blankets forever, so use ones that you won’t be too sorry to lose.

Bubble wrap

The air-filled bubbly material is an outstanding choice when you need to protect the highly fragile and breakable elements of your disassembled furniture – glass doors, glass panels, intricately carved wooden parts, and so on.

Packing tape

Tape is probably the packing supply you will use most frequently when wrapping furniture for a move.

Purchase the best quality packing tape you can find and to make packing really easy, a tape gun is worth its weight in gold.

Shrink wrap

The generous usage of shrink wrap is one of the best ways to protect furniture during a move.

This type of plastic wrap is inexpensive yet very useful to keep drawers, doors, and other moveable elements shut and fixed in place during the move.

Also, shrink-wrapped furniture pieces won’t get exposed to dust, dirt, or other debris on the road to your new home.

You may also like to read: Plastic Wrap for Moving. How and Why it Will Make Your Home Move Easier. There are numerous reasons why professional packers use industrial wrap to protect things when moving home. In this guide, we show you how to use shrink-wrap and why you should use it when moving home.

Sheets of corrugated cardboard

These inexpensive protectors come in very handy when you need to protect larger glass surfaces such as showcases, mirrors, table tops, and so on.

Sealable plastic bags

As you can easily guess, these versatile containers are best used for storing the small fastening elements that have come off your furniture during the disassembly stage.

Miscellaneous

Other supplies you will most likely need while protecting your furniture during a move are a set of hand tools for disassembling the larger pieces, a furniture dolly to facilitate the actual movement of your big furniture and to avoid damage to your different types of floors, and of course – personal protection gear to keep yourself injury-free.

You may also like to read: Home Moving Insurance – Do I Need It? No matter how well-packed, or how well-planned your home move is there is always the possibility of things going wrong. One of the biggest mistakes people make when moving home is not being insured or not having enough insurance coverage in place. This guide tells you all you need to know about insuring a home move.

#2 Clean Your Furniture

After gathering the required packing supplies, the next thing you are recommended to do to protect your furniture while moving is to clean and dust it as a precautionary step.

You may not realise it right away but accumulated debris can sometimes scratch the hard surfaces during the move.

A few quick wipes with a soft (damp) cloth along the entire surface area of your furniture pieces is a good idea that should get you straight to Stage 3.

Don’t waste too much time with this preparation phase as you will have to clean up thoroughly your pieces after the move anyway.

Just be sure no coarse particles, dust, or dirt are present before the upcoming packing process as you won’t be too happy to introduce them to your new home upon delivery.

You may also like to read: How to Deep Clean a Home When Moving. Room-by-Room, item by item, we share some top tips for giving your home a thorough clean including some recipes for some eco-friendly cleaning products.

#3 Disassemble Your Furniture

Whenever possible, you should dismantle your larger and bulkier furniture to guarantee its protection and keep your property from possible damage at the same time.

Remember that if a furniture piece can be removed safely, then you should absolutely do it – it will make the furniture much easier to move and will help prevent damage to walls, floors, and door frames as well.

Important points to take into consideration while dismantling your furniture pieces:

• Whenever you find yourself unsure of how to go about taking apart a piece of furniture, take a look at its construction manual (if you still keep it), try to find the dismantling instructions online, or contact the furniture store you bought it from. If all of these steps fail, then you won’t have much of a choice but to call in experienced experts to give you a hand.
• Any small parts or fastening elements such as bolts, screws, nuts, dowels, etc. should be placed in clearly marked plastic bags and attached to the corresponding furniture piece itself. This way, the removed smaller parts won’t get lost during the moving process and the furniture re-assembly won’t need to be delayed in any way.
• If the dismantling procedure of a furniture piece seems somewhat complicated, you may find it hard to put it back together. This is why it’s a good idea to snap a few quick photos or mark down on a piece of paper it’s exact assembled configuration to save loads of time later on.

Couches/Sofas/Tables: Remove the legs or any protrusions from your couches, sofas, or tables. Depending on the design of your pieces, those legs alone may add up to 1 foot to their dimensions, thus making them extremely tough to navigate around tight corners or narrow hallways.

You may also like to read: How to Move a Sofa by Yourself. In this guide, we offer step-by-step instructions on how to pack and move a sofa to your new home.

Bed: Regardless of whether you have a king-size bed, a queen-size bed, a single bed, or a folding sofa, follow the construction manual to dismantle the bed frame. Dismantle the headboard first by unscrewing it from the main wooden frame. If the bed is equipped with a storage frame underneath it, remove whatever is stored in the drawers and remove them as well. Keep in mind that the more elements you manage to take apart from your bed, the easier it will be to pack and transport it in the safest way possible.

You may also like to read: How to Pack and Move a Bed by Yourself. In this guide, we offer detailed instructions on how to prepare, pack, and move a bed to your new home.

Wardrobe/Dresser: Remove everything you can from inside it – clothes, other belongings, shelves, drawers to make sure the unit won’t get damaged while it is being moved around. If the doors of the furniture piece are made entirely or partially of glass, or if they seem uncharacteristically fragile and prone to physical damage, then you will have to remove them and wrap them in moving blankets to provide the best protection possible.

#4 Pack Up Your Furniture

Here we come to the most essential stage when trying to answer the question of how to protect furniture when moving.

Pay attention to the tips for packing furniture below and you won’t ever need to worry about whether your precious household items will end up damaged or not.

Create a Packing Station

Designate a packing station at a convenient spot in your home and gather there all easily moveable furniture pieces like chairs, small tables, or even disassembled elements of larger furniture.

Prepare the necessary packing materials as time tends to tick away faster during a house move.

Using Bubble Wrap

Bubble wrap should be your first line of defense – use it to cover up particularly fragile parts of your furniture and use tape to secure the protective sheets.

A word of caution here: you should not tape directly over polished or painted surfaces as that could do more harm than good in the long run.

Use Shrink-Wrap

As mentioned above, shrink wrap can be cleverly and strategically used when packing furniture for a move to keep drawers, cabinets, and doors from opening.

Any loose parts that are not held in place can become safety hazards for both the furniture pieces in question and the people involved in the relocation.

Interestingly enough, cellophane wrap can play another 2 major roles during a residential move.

First, if you decide to leave some light and non-breakable items in the drawers, you can shrink-wrap their contents and protect them against dust and moisture.

Secondly, wrapping the entire external area of a furniture piece with wrap will keep any scratches, dirt, and water damage away.

Protect Glass and Corners

Now it’s time to make good use of those sheets of corrugated cardboard and add another level of protection for your valuable furniture.

Place glass elements between two cardboard pieces, add sheets of bubble wrap, and tape the bundle as securely as you can.

You can also fix smaller cardboard cut-outs around endangered furniture corners to absorb any possible hits along the road.

 Use Mattress Covers

Use special mattress covers to protect your bed mattress against moisture, tears, stains, and other harmful external factors.

You can always use shrink wrap and moving blankets as an alternative option but the special purpose mattress protectors are the preferred choice for a reason.

You may also like to read: How to Move a Mattress by Yourself. In this guide, we take you step-by-step through the process of packing and moving a mattress by yourself in far more detail.

Use Moving Blankets

The use of moving blankets is arguably the most important step in protecting your furniture while moving house.

In reality, their importance can’t be stressed enough. Any protruding parts that are non-removable should be well protected through moving blankets or any other old and soft pieces of clothing you own.

Keep in mind that the legs of chairs, sofas, and tables are more susceptible to damage than any other hardware parts.

Wrap them up all in moving blankets and use packing tape to fix the thick protectors in place. Also, cover any exposed areas of your favorite furniture pieces to make sure that they survive the house relocation in their original condition.

You may also like to read: How to Move Heavy and Large Pieces of Furniture. Knowing how to safely move your furniture is just as crucial as knowing how to pack them properly. This guide tells you all you need to know about moving heavy or large pieces of furniture.

Final Furniture Packing Tip

In summary, the best way to protect your furniture for moving is to never rule out the possibility that something genuinely bad might happen to your valued pieces. House moves are fairly unpredictable and tend to become more chaotic as moving day draws nearer and nearer.

Remember that you can’t possibly overprotect your furniture pieces and whenever you catch yourself wondering if you’ve gone too far as far as safety is concerned, then that thought alone means that you’re on the right path.

It’s better to be safe than sorry makes all the sense in the world when it comes to protecting your furniture in the best possible way.

This also means that if you feel nervous about the outcome of the entire furniture protection procedure or if you reach a dead end in your preparations, then you don’t really have to put the entire relocation operation in jeopardy.

Do the sensible thing and get in touch with experienced moving professionals and let them handle this responsible and tough furniture protection job.