Knowing how to stop furniture from sliding can be of great help for houses with hardwood floors.
People love wooden floors simply because they look beautiful. The natural color and grain lend a charming appeal to their home interiors. That said, the smooth nature of the woods means there’s a lack of reasonable grip for chairs and sofas to stay in place.
You’ve probably noticed the couches or chairs slightly slide every time you or someone sit on them. Aside from the hassle of repositioning everything, constantly sliding furniture can cause great damage to the floor itself.
Fortunately, you can solve this problem in several ways, and we’re going to help you out.
7 Effective Ways to Keep Your Furniture from Sliding
Here are a few inexpensive, easy-to-follow tips to keep your couches, chairs, recliner, table from sliding all over the place.
1. Use Rugs
For those who care a lot about the room’s décor, rugs provide a great solution to sliding furniture without compromising your room’s aesthetic quality. The fabric texture provides a much-needed amount of grip as a carpet flooring would. It’s also pleasing and enticing to walk around.
If you’ve got many pieces of furniture around your couch, there’s no better anti-skid method than investing in a large, good rug. It can cover a wider range of items, saving you from the hassle of dealing with individual ones.
When purchasing a rug, double-check to make sure it comes with non-stick padding on one side. Some rugs or chair mats don’t offer this feature, and it would make no sense to purchase an item that will slide along with your couches.
While there is a wide variety of choices out there, it’s advisable to be mindful of the patterns and colors of the item.
Chances are you want a rug that flattens your room design but comes without a non-slip pad. In that case, you can pay some extra to get a separate pad to adhere to the bottom of your rug.
2. Rubber Drawer Liners for Furniture Legs
Drawer liners keep utensils or silverware in place on shelves and drawers. They provide a considerable amount of grip to protect your easy-to-break items from damage when the drawer is sliding in and out.
The same principle can apply to a larger piece of furniture like couches or recliners. Your furniture gets the grip they need to stay put when you or your loved ones sit on it. All you need to do is cut the liners into smaller pieces that align with the couch leg’s size and place them on the bottom furniture piece.
On the upside, this method lets you make the most use of the tools you’ve already had in your home. However, it works for a shorter time compared to other furniture grippers.
3. Place Stop Blocks Behind The Couch
We recommend stop blocks for large pieces of furniture such as recliners or sofas. This method can apply when the recliner or sofa back faces towards the wall, and the distance between them is not significant.
Stop blocks are typically from wood or other materials as long as they’re sturdy enough to deal with the force and weight that an average adult person applies to the couch.
Two to three pieces of wood blocks between the back and the wall is enough to keep your couch from sliding all over the place. They are slightly more expensive than rubber pads or drawer liners but more superior in terms of quality. The good news is you can create your wood blocks at home to save some bucks.
First off, draw the shape of your couch legs onto cardboard, on which you will rely to cut out the real blocks.
Then, measure the distance between the wall and the couch’s back to create the perfect blocks. If you forget to get the measurements, you’ll need to rearrange the couch a bit to suit the block, which is more of a nuisance.
While preventing furniture from sliding, stop blocks don’t protect your floor from nasty scuff marks, especially if you’ve got kids who often jump up and down on the couch.
4. Place Your Couch at The Corner of The Room
A sofa or two in the middle of the living room might be your go-to arrangement. However, the furniture placed in this way is more prone to sliding than any other arrangement style.
You probably notice every time someone sat on the sofa, it moved backward a little bit, requiring you to readjust it afterward.
Try out another way of placement: Push your living room couch to the corner of the room or at least against a wall (if all of the corners are occupied by other pieces of furniture), and you’ll see the difference.
Some people consider a sofa against the wall a decorating mistake that should be avoided. However, we believe that as long as there are matching decorative elements and a great color combination, you’ll still get a stunning room décor without the issue of slippery furniture.
Make sure that you create enough room amongst sofas for comfortable chatting. At the end of the day, with some pushing and rearranging, you can stop your couch from sliding in no time and ruining your perfect hardwood floor.
5. Make Socks for Your Furniture
Good news for crafty people who love creating things on their own: You can create socks for your chairs, tables, and sofas to keep them in place.
To start off, you will need tools and materials such as thread, scissors, drinking glass, marker, ribbon, an old towel that you no longer use, and a fabric patch. Many of you might have these items on hand, and if you don’t, you can easily purchase them from any store.
Handmade chair socks speak volumes about the homeowner’s taste. Although it takes you some time, it’s rewarding to see unique, pretty socks that can prevent your couch from sliding on slippery floor surfaces.
That said, as these coverings are made from fabric, they will not provide a good grip as rubber pads. So if you’re dealing with a severe problem of sliding furniture, sofa socks are not the optimal approach.
6. Use Anti-Slip Furniture Rubber Pads
Rubber pads are the most economical option and perhaps the easiest to find in home improvement stores or online. They’re specially made to keep chairs, couches, and other items in place.
Simply place rubber pads underneath the feet of sofas and recliners, and they won’t move when you’re lopping yourself down again.
What’s more, they protect your hardwood, laminate floors against annoying scratches and mars when you drag your furniture around. You can also notice that it makes less noise while moving with pads.
For those reasons, rubber pads are suitable for items that you usually move around a lot, like dining room chairs.
There are a variety of sizes available. All you need to do is measure the couch’s feet and look into the product description to purchase the right size.
7. Dust Your Floor
You might not expect it, but keeping your floor clean is the first thing you need to do before revising up whatever anti-slide approaches for your furniture.
A floor laden with dust renders everything more slippery. For that reason, even rubber pads or anything with anti-slide propriety is still bound to slide on it.
Before placing pads, rugs underneath the furniture, or putting on the couch’s socks, make sure the surface is dust-free first. Also, it pays to dust your floor at least once a week.
Conclusion
You’ve known all the hacks to stop your furniture from sliding around, and the next step is to choose what works best for your furniture and see how effective the solution is.
Whatever you choose, these methods are simple, inexpensive, and won’t take away from you so much time. If you’ve got time in your hand, and love building things from scratch, give furniture’s socks a shot.
Hopefully, everything in your room will stay in place as if on carpet floorings, and you can protect the floor surface from ugly scratches as a result. So next time when your guests come over, there’s no wasted time for repositioning the couches anymore.
You might also want to read:
- 5 Easy Methods to Prevent Couch Cushions from Slipping
- 4 Effective Ways to Stop Carpet Edges from Unraveling
