How to Keep a Light Sofa Clean During a Move

Want to learn the secret for how to keep a light sofa clean during a move?  Basically, how to protect ANY upholstered furniture during a move and how to transport furniture without damaging it?

Monday I blogged about giving the old sofa the heave-ho.  Yesterday you met the new-to-us sofa.  One last post before I move on from the sofa topic: how we safely managed to get a cream-coloured sofa home from the seller’s house.

We searched for a mover on kijiji.ca and prices ranged from $50-85 for a sofa transport 15 km, with hubby providing one-half of the required muscle.  After some chatting, one mover agreed to $40 but his van, although clean, wasn’t cream-sofa clean (nor were his hands, lol).  Although leather is easy to clean, I cringed at the thought of ruining the sofa up before we even got it home.  But not to worry because, between the two of us, Hubby and I have moved about seven times in ten years, so we’ve picked up some tips & tricks.

The Trick for Protecting Furniture During a Move?

What’s our tip in this case?  Furniture-sized plastic wrap!  Office supplies stores, Costco, the Home Depot, and Amazon all carry this large clingy wrap and we’ve use it to wrap furniture, artwork – basically anything that won’t fit into boxes.  We even use it to keep drawers from sliding out of dressers during a move.  We will load a dresser into a truck without drawers (because it’s lighter), then slide the drawers in and wrap it up with this cling wrap to protect the surface but also keep the drawers in.  If you’re moving, or just love buying furniture, you’ll definitely want to pick up a roll of this large cling wrap.  Sometimes it’s even sold with longer handles attached, to make wrapping large items even easier.  This is what it looks like on the roll:

And here’s what the sofa looked like, all wrapped up.  This wrap is very clingy, much like food-grade plastic wrap, but you want to pull it really tightly because as it stretches, it grips the surface of any nearby wrap.  Start at either the top or bottom, and then move around the furniture, wrapping as you go and always overlapping the cling wrap so it can cling to itself and fully ensconce the item in question.

That’s the secret to how the cream-coloured sofa stayed fingerprint-free on the journey over.  Maybe we should have left the plastic wrap on so we can keep it that way, lol?

Does Plastic Wrap Protect Furniture?

Yes, wrapping furniture in shrink wrap or large cling wrap will protect furniture.  This plastic is pretty sturdy and once furniture is securely wrapped with it, not only will it deflect any stains and dirt, it will also protect against minor scratches and scrapes.  However, furniture – especially delicate pieces with thin wood veneer – can still be damaged once wrapped in plastic.  For more delicate pieces or longer moved, we will use cardboard corners and something thicker, like a blanket, cardboard, or even bubble wrap, to protect furniture before wrapping it in plastic.

P.S. Don’t Forget to Pin This Tip for Later!