As a furniture moving company in Charleston, SC we know that house moves are stressful enough without your having to worry about valuable and valued furniture being damaged in the upheaval. Whether you’re looking to protect a family heirloom, an expensive antique table, or a long, tailor-made mirror, there are some universal tips that’ll help you, your family and all of your belongings relocate in one piece.
Read on for ways in which you can protect your most valued furniture items from even minor scuffs or cosmetic damage on the journey from your old to your new home.
Understand the Weak Spots
Each item of furniture will have a weak spot. This is where it’s most likely to break under the right amount of stress. For a folding chair, this will be on the points at which the chair folds. For an antique table, the legs are going to be what’s in danger during your house move. Consider all your items of furniture for these weak spots in order to highlight in your mind – and in the mind of our employees.
Liaise with Removal Men
Most house moves involve some form of hired help. There is, after all, an awful lot of manual labor for one family to do on their own. These individuals will be professionals in handling furniture, so you shouldn’t have to worry about heavy-handedness or a certain disregard for the furniture that you’re transporting.
Nevertheless, it’s important to have a conversation with your hired help to highlight to them which items of furniture you’re particularly worried about – they’ll take extra care with these items.
Labeling
Your other method of communicating to the removal people, jogging their memories on either side of the move, is to use some form of tag on your most valuable and fragile furniture items to display the fact that they should be handled with extreme care.
Often, you’ll be able to purchase packing tape off a bright color that screams ‘FRAGILE’ on its length. Covering your wrapped furniture items in this tape will be a strong reminder to those carrying it that they should be careful, slow, and deliberate in order not to cause damage to what they’re hauling.
Expert Wrapping
Some furniture you’ll be worried about sustaining significant damage – like a table losing a leg, or a mirror smashing. But all items of furniture, regardless of its value, you’ll want to protect from suffering the inevitable scuffs and bangs that large transported goods are liable to encounter on the road.
Wrapping your furniture should help you in this regard. Whether you borrow thick sheets from friends, hire them from companies that provide them, or you have some hidden in your garage, you’re looking to swaddle all your furniture in these sheets in order to protect their surfaces from the odd scratch or brush with a wall. Ask your hired help to wrap them expertly, or otherwise look online to see how best to wrap furniture to ensure its protection from bumps and scratches.
Personal Oversight
As your furniture’s being carried to and from the removal truck, you should make sure you’re a personal presence – watching each and every item that gets loaded and unloaded. By monitoring your furniture as it’s being carried, you’ll be able to alert your hired help about any particularly valuable items that you’d like to be treated with extra care. You’ll also be able to spot the weaknesses that removal people might not. For instance, if a furniture item is stacked on top of another, weaker one, you’ll be able to request they’re swapped in order to minimize the risk placed on the weak item. Oversight also guarantees a certain peace of mind, if you’re stressed about the care afforded to your possessions’ protection.
Individual Transportation
You may have one or two furniture items that you’re in deep and relentless love with, that you simply cannot accept coming to any harm. In these cases, you might want to exercise extreme caution by transporting them separately from the rest of your possessions. Set aside whichever high-value items you have and ask your transporters to take them on a separate trip. Obviously, this is most convenient if you’re moving across town – and very inconvenient if you’re moving from coast to coast – but in the interests of protecting your most valuable furniture, it’s a sensible move to single them out for the extra care and protection that they deserve.
Beware Complacency
It’s remarkably difficult to stay focused on the job at hand throughout the entire moving process. If you take your eye off the ball for even a few seconds, you might end up damaging some furniture due to complacency. It’s therefore advisable that you remain alert to the dangers your furniture might face throughout the removal process until their rehomed safely and securely.
Many household items are damaged at the final stages of the move because there is a sense that you’ve got them to their destination in one piece. As such, even as your furniture is being positioned in its designated new room, remain vigilant until it’s finally placed. After all the care you’ve put into transporting your goods safely, it would be a shame to let a moment’s distractedness lead to damage.
Insurance
Even the best-laid plans can sometimes come undone, which is where you’ll benefit from household insurance during your move. Easy to take out and important if your possessions are worth a good deal of money, you’ll be protecting your investments by ensuring them for their difficult passage from one home to the other. It’s to be hoped that you never have to call in this insurance, but it’s nonetheless a great way to maintain peace of mind in case of the most unfortunate eventualities transpiring.
Moving home is a lengthy and at times stressful process. Save yourself the stress of losing valued items of furniture to damage by maintaining concentration throughout the removal process, talking with your hired help about your most valuable items, and preparing them as best you can for transportation. If you follow all the tips provided in this article, you’re highly likely to see everything you own to arrive in your new home in the same condition that it left your old one in.
