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Given enough time, the carpet in your house is bound to need replacement. It may be needed because of an accident, like that red wine glass that got knocked over by your elbow when you were turning to grab the remote control. Or perhaps your 3 year old son got a bright idea to use a blue marker to draw on the blank white carpet canvas. Alternatively, it may be needed for aesthetic reasons, like wanting a new color carpet to neatly match with the walls you recently had painted. Whatever the reason may be, the task of hiring a professional carpet installation company will also come along with the task of rearranging furniture in rooms. This will be necessary so the crew can get access to the carpet, both to tear out the old and to install the new. When you find yourself in this situation, it’ll be important for you to avoid these 7 common mistakes.
Mistake #1- Keeping the Items on the Carpet While Shuffling Them Around
While it is technically possible to keep your furniture in the same room by shuffling the pieces to different areas as the carpet is getting installed, this is not a good idea. The main reason is because shifting weight like this will negatively impact the tension that is needed to tightly fit the carpet. The result would likely be that the new carpet is too loose in some corners and too tight in others. Cutting corners can work in some cases, but this isn’t one of them.
Mistake #2- Start Moving Items Before You Know if They will Fit
We’ve all heard it said, “Measure twice; cut once”. This saying applies to relocating furniture just as much as to construction work. Just imagine doing all that backbreaking work of lifting your double recliner upstairs only to discover that it doesn’t fit through the entry door. Then you’d need to move it all the way back downstairs only to get back to square one, where you started. On the contrary, always be sure to measure the width and length of items to ensure they fit through doors and can all be squeezed in the room that you temporarily want to place them.
Mistake #3- Move Items Long Before the Carpet Installers Arrive
Let’s say you have a living room that needs new carpet. You begin to get antsy and so you decide to get ahead on your to-do list by clearing out all the furniture: the hutch, recliner, massage chair, table and bookshelf. Whew, you finally got it all done, and 1 week ahead of time! You’re feeling pretty good about things… until that moment when you realize you’re unable to enjoy your favorite TV show from the comfort of your couch. Instead, you’ll need to watch it while standing up! The moral of the story here is to time your move to happen roughly 24 hours before the carpet installers arrive. And the same thing goes for when the furniture needs to be moved back to where it was.
Mistake #4- Using the Garage (or Basement) When a Closer Room is Available
The path of least resistance is not always the best choice when it comes to relationships with other people, but it is usually the best choice when it comes to rearranging heavy furniture. If you need to move a heavy armoire, would you rather move it 50 feet or 100 feet? Would you rather move it up 8 stairs or down 3 stairs? The answer to these questions is easy. It would be a mistake to do more (and harder) work for no good reason. So do yourself (or your movers) a favor and don’t require heavy items to be relocated further away than they need to be.
Mistake #5- Leaving Furniture Fully Assembled Prior to Moving Them
Similar to the last point, this might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s still worth mentioning: disassemble bigger items so they’ll be easier to relocate. This is painfully obvious for oversized items like a pool table, but it’s easily overlooked for medium-sized items like a couch. If the cushions can be removed, then don’t make the mistake of leaving them on. It might not remove a ton of weight, perhaps only 10 pounds, but that makes a 20% difference when moving a 50 pound couch. It’s the little things that count. So the principle here is this: if you can take apart an item to lessen the weight, then do it for the sake of your back.
Mistake #6- Stacking Fragile Items on Top of One Another
If your new carpet needs to be installed on an entire floor of your house, then you’ll need heavy items from multiple rooms to be relocated. This usually involves stuffing 1 room (where you don’t need carpet replaced) full of furniture. Without a plan in place, it’s easily a temptation to just stack one item on top of the other without much thought. This is the right solution but stacking items has an art to it and putting a nightstand on top of a dresser is an accident waiting to happen. Don’t put a wooden item on top of another wooden item without proper padding in between, otherwise the wood will probably get scratches. Also, minimize risky stacking by not putting fragile items on top of one another.
Mistake #7- Lifting Heavy Items when Easier Solutions Exist
In some scenarios, doing the backbreaking work of lifting heavy items is the only solution, like when the items need to be moved up or down stairs. However, when you only need to rearranging furniture on the same floor, then you can get away with sliding rather than lifting. There is actually a thing called furniture sliders which are an amazing invention. Watch the video below to get a tutorial on how to use furniture sliders.
Rearranging furniture in preparation for carpet installation can be a daunting task. But if you remember to avoid these 7 mistakes, then it will go a lot smoother. If the project of lifting your heavy items still seems too challenging, then consider hiring a moving company like His Workmanship to do the heavy lifting for you. Just click here to get a free quote or click here to learn more about our process.