How to Move Concrete Furniture Without Hurting Anyone

Heavy furniture does not hurt people because it is heavy. It hurts people because somebody changed their grip halfway through a doorway. Everything below is about removing the moment where that happens.

Plan the route before you touch anything

Walk it first, empty-handed, and look for the five things that cause problems.

• The narrowest point. Usually a door frame, occasionally a radiator pipe or a stair handrail. Measure it.
• The turn. A 1600 mm slab needs a diagonal, not a width. A landing that measures fine can still be impossible to turn in.
• The floor change. Thresholds and door bars are where sliders catch.
• The dead end. Somewhere you can set the piece down safely if somebody needs to rest. Decide where that is in advance.
• The destination. Clear it completely before you start. Nobody should be holding 84 kg while another person moves a chair out of the way.

Protect the floor and the edges

Lay something down on the route: moving blankets, flattened cardboard, offcuts of carpet. Not because the slab will be dropped, but because the piece has to be set down several times and a concrete edge meeting a tiled floor loses.

Protect the piece too. The corners are the vulnerable part of any cast slab, and they are exactly what hits a door frame. A blanket taped around each end takes two minutes.

Lifting it

The principles are the boring ones and they are boring because they work.

• Two people minimum, three with stairs or a turn.
• Agree who is leading and who is going backwards before lifting. The person walking backwards gets instructions, not opinions.
• Feet apart, bend at the knees and hips, keep the load close to your body, lift by straightening your legs.
• Never twist while loaded. Move your feet instead.
• Keep fingers out from under the slab. Set it down on battens or blocks so you can get your hands back out.
• Carry a slab on edge, gripped near the ends, not flat.

If you are in any doubt about the weight, do not test the theory in a stairwell. Lifting straps cost very little and transfer the load to your shoulders and legs rather than your fingers and back.

Sliding instead of lifting

On a flat hard floor, sliding is often the better answer. Proper furniture sliders under each foot turn a 84 kg push into something one person can do carefully.

Two rules. Push low and steady rather than rocking the piece, and never slide over a threshold. A slider that catches stops the base while the top keeps going, which is how a piece tips.

On carpet, use hard sliders. On hard floors, use felt or soft pads.

Separating what can be separated

Before anything heroic, check whether the piece comes apart. A concrete slab that sits on steel plates is far easier handled as a slab and two plates than as one bench, and reassembly is usually nothing more than placing it back.

If a piece is welded or cast as one, it does not come apart, and that is the point at which you plan around it rather than hope.

Stairs

Stairs change the maths. The lower person takes most of the weight and has the worst view. Three people, one slow step at a time, stopping on landings rather than mid-flight.

If the staircase turns, measure the diagonal clearance on the turn before you start, because that is where a long slab stops being possible. Finding this out on the half-landing with two people holding it is the worst version of this job.

When to pay somebody

If the route has more than one flight of stairs, if there is no lift and the piece is over about 80 kg, or if there are only two of you and one has a bad back, hire two people with straps for an hour. It costs less than a physiotherapist and much less than a chipped slab.

After it lands

• Check it sits flat and does not rock. Shim a foot if the floor is uneven rather than leaving it to grind.
• Put pads under the feet to protect the floor from point loads.
• Look at the edges and corners in good light so any transit damage is found now, not in a month.