New flooring - what to do with furniture?

[Notjustabrunette]

Hi, I want to replace my laminate flooring with wooden flooring. The question is, what do I do with my furniture? We have one big living/dining room, loads of bookcase, a desk etc in that room. We have a separate kitchen, but can’t put too much in there. What do people do? Move it all down one end of the room and then move it to the other? Put it in the garden?

Depends how long it will take.

If it's just for a few hours then moving the furniture to another part of the house or under cover outside might work.

We got a local light haulage firm to move our furniture out to my parents garage and then back again a few weeks later once we had decorated and new flooring was down. We had no space to store it. It's a bit extreme but it worked for us.

Hmmm, not sure how long it will take. A few days I would have thought. We have a garage, but it’s pretty full. I didn’t really want to pay for it be moved and stored. Maybe I should think about clearing out the garage.

We had downstairs done first, so just moved all the furniture upstairs and just packed it in to the bedrooms - except one sofa which we put in the garage, and another corner unit which we split into modules and the floor fitters just moved it to the other side of the room then swapped it over. Took about a week but we just got out all the clothes we needed and left a track to the beds for us all! A bit of a pain but fine. Then when we had upstairs done, it was carpet, so much quicker - we took everything downstairs the night before and just slept on mattresses, then took them downstairs in the morning and put it all back in the evening - does that help?

(And we ate out / at a friends house or had a basic picnic at home in the evenings that week!)

I just remove small breakable or personal objects then leave the main items of furniture for the fitters to move. I use a local carpet shop who have their own fitters and make sure they are aware that I live alone and cannot move furniture.

I had laminate fitted in my lounge last year and the fitter just moved the two settees, tv unit and coffee table to one side of the room while he fitted the empty area them swapped it all back. The fitter worked on his own.

Last month I has two downstairs bedrooms carpeted, both with a double bed and bedside cabinets. There were two fitters and they moved the mattresses and cabinets into the hall way but left the bed frames in the bedroom. I have no idea how they worked as I just kept out of their was for the couple of hours it took. They were just grateful that they did not have to carry the heavy rolls of carpet upstairs!

Prices at the local shop are higher than at large chain stores but I prefer the personal touch, taking samples home, salesperson coming to measure rooms and advise on products, not paying in full until happy with the work, using their fitters and having any queries dealt with by the same person. I’m also keen to support local shops on our high streets.

Thanks for all your answers, has all been very helpful.

It's normal to leave large pieces of furniture stacked at one side so long as fitters can get at a clear half of the floor then shift the furniture over.

They will appreciate if you can stash all the smaller stuff elsewhere so swapping ends is a simple as possible.

Yes I had this done recently and just moved as much as I could upstairs but sofas etc were just moved from one end of the room to the other as work progressed.

We had the whole ground floor laid in 2 days flat. The fitter started with the kitchen, then we moved what we could from the living room in there. What was left, he just moved around.

We moved as much as we could into kitchen and bedrooms and left what we couldn’t. Floor fitters moved final items around. They did it while we were on hols as we couldn’t walk on floor for 2 days afterwards.

I wondered about this too, we want new bedroom carpets, no idea what we do about beds and chest of drawers!

Thanks all, I was mostly wondering what the heck to do with the sofas. Good to hear that they can be moved down one end of the room at a time. Was thinking of putting the gazebo up in the garden 😅

yes, potentially worth going with somewhere that doesn't subcontract and will move/work round furniture. We're in a really small house, and there simply isn't anywhere for stuff to go. When we had our bedroom re-carpeted we chose smaller firm who would add shifting furniture into the price after coming out to have a look first. Obviously we moved what we could, but the bed and wardrobe remained, and when we have the sitting room done it will be the same with the sofas.