For homeowners, there’s no greater investment than a hardwood floor. With the right care, it can add to the value of your home for a long time to come. Unfortunately, wooden floors are easy to damage.

The most common damage, scratching, occurs when you fail to protect a wood floor from furniture. As beautiful as your furniture and flooring are, together they can create some very unsightly scratches.

Luckily, it’s quite easy to protect your wood floors from furniture by following a few golden rules. And your floor will thank you for it.

Rule 1: Never push or drag furniture

With heavy pieces of furniture, it’s easy to forget to lift when you’re moving items while cleaning or decorating. It’s often easier than enlisting some help, but it comes at a heavy cost: scuffing.

Wherever possible, ask a friend (or two!) to help you lift heavy furniture on wood floors to their new location. It may delay things, but it will keep your wood floor safe from damage.

Rule 2: Dining chairs? Use felt pads for hardwood floors

We are often asked how to protect hardwood floors from scratches in the dining room. Make sure that, with your dining chairs, you use felt to protect hardwood floors. These soft, felt pads, are particularly useful for chairs situated on bare floor.

Introducing this protection to your chairs means that chairs can be moved without risking the surface of your wooden floor.

Rule 4: Use furniture feet protectors

Of course, it’s not just your dining chairs which cause scratches and scuffs. A wide range of furniture feet protectors are available now.

Furniture pads and glider pads are two types of furniture feet protectors. Wood floors benefit from these because they cushion the feet while raising the furniture slightly off the floor.

Furniture feet protection can be applied in one of three ways.

Self-adhesive protectors tend to be made from felt or rubber and are often the cheapest option. The drawback of this easy-to-apply method is that they simply do not last as long as the other two options.

Slip-on feet protectors are normally made from rubber and last much longer. Simply slip it on a furniture leg and the wooden floor is protected. As great as this option is, the feet protectors may not be the most attractive option.

The most secure and longest-lasting, by far, are tap-on (nail-on) pads. Since they are attached to the furniture leg using a screw, there is a risk of scratching if not installed correctly.

With a bit of effort, you can create your own protective pads for furniture. All you need is some old quilts or blankets and a pair of scissors. Cut to the size necessary and place beneath the furniture leg. This won’t necessarily have the ‘staying power’ of shop-bought alternatives, but is an effective solution for those with limited budgets. It’s also the quickest fix for protecting your wooden flooring.

Rule 5: Assess your furniture feet regularly

Check the feet of your old furniture on a regular basis. Look out for rough edges on the base as these can lead to scratches or gauges.

To deal with these, you’ll need a sandpaper sheet. Sand lightly until you achieve a smooth surface. If you have a sanding tool, such as a mouse, you can use that here to speed things up.

Rule 6: Stay aware

Our final rule is perhaps the most important of them all.

While there are many ways of protecting your floor, they’re only as effective as the person monitoring them.

Adopting a proactive approach to the treatment of your hardware floor can pay dividends. Plus, it’s the only sure-fire way to ensure your wood floors look as great on Day 1 as Day 10,000.

As is often the case, prevention is much easier than the cure. In this case, however, it’s also quicker and cheaper, too.

Be sure to contact ESB Flooring for more guidance if you need it!