Realizing your chair or table is wobbly is maddening — especially if you’re in the middle of a meal. But this pesky problem doesn’t mean you need to go out and buy a whole new furniture set. There are easy fixes for wobbly furniture legs, and most of them are free or ultra-cheap.
A quick note before you begin: First, check to make sure your floor isn’t uneven. You can do this by moving the furniture around (if possible) and checking if it still feels unstable after being relocated. If moving the furniture does fix the issue, the culprit is most likely your floor, and you’ll need to contact a flooring professional. If you determine that the issue is the furniture itself and not the floor, here are three easy ways to wrangle the wobble.
1. Tighten the Hardware
Loose hardware is one of the most overlooked furniture issues, and yet it’s one of the most easily fixed. Check the screws on your furniture legs — do any of them feel loose? If the wobble is slight, you can most likely tighten the screws using a screwdriver. If the wobble is more pronounced, however, you may need to bust out the cordless drill and use a drill bit and epoxy to secure the screws.
2. Add Furniture Pads
Furniture pads do double duty: They save your floors from scratches and they provide some much-needed stability to wobbly furniture legs. Ideally, you want pads on all of your furniture’s legs to protect your floor. But if scratching isn’t an issue, you can add a furniture pad to only the wobbly leg. You can also try adding pads to all nonwobbly legs, and two to three pads to the wobbly leg. Experiment with different numbers of pads to determine which combination yields the most stable results.
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3. Use a Slice of Cork
Opt for this easy hack if you have extra wine corks lying around. Gently lift the wobbly leg until the whole piece of furniture is level. Now, measure the distance between the bottom of the wobbly leg and the floor. (If the gap is too small to measure, estimate the thickness with your fingers.) Next, use a utility knife or similar sharp knife to slice off a thin cork disc that is the same thickness as the gap you measured. Use wood glue or hot glue to attach the cork disc to the bottom of the furniture leg. Note: While both natural and synthetic corks work for this fix, a natural cork will degrade faster.
