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Okay, let’s get real for a moment. If you have a big enough truck, enough muscle, and a strong enough back, you could move yourself. Most people don’t want to move themselves, though, which is why the moving industry is a multi-billion dollar business.
There are exceptions to moving yourself, though, and one of those exceptions might be sitting in your rec room. If you have a pool table, you can move it yourself, but it’s doubtful you’ll want to. They are heavy, and if anything breaks, they are very expensive to repair.
The biggest problem with moving a pool table is that they always need to be disassembled, and most have two or three panels of slate under the felt. While slate seems like it’s (excuse the bad pun) solid as a rock, it breaks quite easily. A professional mover will crate those pieces of slate. If you still want to tackle it yourself, here’s how:
Grab Your Tool Kit
You’ll need safety goggles, a flathead screwdriver, a power drill, a staple puller and a socket wrench. Be sure you label each piece you remove.
Remove the Pockets and the Rails
This is perhaps the easiest part of moving a pool table. Sometimes they’re bolted on, and sometimes stapled. Either way, be careful. Removing the rails might be a two person job.
Remove the Felt
Removing the felt can be tricky, and many choose to simply rip it off, and replace it at the new place. If you don’t want to replace the felt, that’s where the staple remover comes in. It’s a painstaking process to remove the felt, but you want to be very careful. One wrong step, and it will tear.
Grab Some Friends and Remove the Slate
Now that you’ve uncovered the slate, you’re probably feeling pretty good, but know that the back breaking part of moving a pool table is still to come. The slate usually comes in three pieces, each weighing around 200-300 pounds. Despite its heft, slate offers one additional challenge; it’s very heavy. A small chip or crack will render that piece of slate useless, which in turn will render all three pieces useless, since they are custom made to fit together. If you replace just one piece of slate, you could end up with bumps and ridges in your pool table.
The best way to move the slate is to protect each piece in a wooden crate. That’s what most movers would do. The other option is to very carefully wrap each piece, and stabilize them when you move them. It will take at least two people to move each piece.
Wrap Everything Else
Next, you’ll need to wrap the rails and the legs before loading them onto the truck. Hopefully you’ve labeled everything, because you’ll need to do what you just did to reassemble it, only in reverse.
I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted just thinking about moving a pool table. There’s a good reason most people hire pros to move pool tables, and that’s because they’re really hard to move.
Featured image via Pxhere
