How to prevent kitchen chairs from scratching floors

If you care about your polished floors, you’ll almost certainly cringe when you hear the sound of a chair scraping across them. Reminiscent of a school teacher’s nails on a blackboard, the sound of permanent scratches being carved into your previously unblemished floorboards or tiles can feel like a horror show. So how do you avoid the nightmare and stop kitchen chairs from ruining flooring? This floor preservation guide serves up some ideas.

Plastic casters for kitchen chairs

Often used to ensure that heavy furniture doesn’t damage carpeted areas of the home, these casters can be fitted to the legs of your chairs to ensure that wooden or tiled flooring is not damaged by chair scraping.

Unfortunately, if you lift chairs instead of sliding them out, casters can come loose if not firmly attached. An inner adhesive will usually do the trick to keep casters in place.

Hard floor mats

If you don't fancy attaching something to your chair legs to stop them scraping on kitchen floors, you may like to lay a mat or rug directly under your kitchen table. This means that chairs will need to be lifted up properly to be pulled in or out, as they will no longer glide along flooring.

The rug or mat can be chosen to match the general decor of the room and can be made to look quick stylish. Be careful though, an expensive rug may end up with red wine or food splashed all over it if there are spills at the table.

Kitchen chair booties

This one may sound a bit far-fetched, but you can actually buy socks for the legs of your chairs! These purpose-made socks can be attached to most chair legs, and come in a range of sizes at home improvement and hardware stores. The chair booties often blend into the colour and style of your chair, but some may feel that they look rather unsightly.

One thing is for sure though - the chairs no longer scrape on the flooring while the booties are attached. They act as a cushion, and the chair feet glide noiselessly and harmlessly over the flooring to prevent scratching - a practical, but perhaps not so pretty approach to stopping your kitchen chairs from scratching your floors.

Whatever method you choose to stop kitchen chairs from scratching flooring, be sure to let family and guests know that the problem exists first off. It may only require some reminders to pick up chairs, rather than scraping them along the floor. This way, the problem may be solved without any real intervention being required.