Should I put casters on my sofa?

Hi there, I'm Chris from Roger & Chris and I'm here today to answer an important question. Should I put casters on my sofa?

Casters, what are they? Alright, so casters are when you see a sofa that has cool little wheels at the bottom of the leg. That's a caster. The concept behind this is that it makes it easier to wheel the sofa around for cleaning. That's the historical precedent. I don't know that it makes sofas easier to wheel around for cleaning. I do know that it is a cool look and that's realistically why people do them. I like 'em, I think they look neat.

There are some down sides and I think you need to consider 'em. When we do a regular fixed leg, an all wood leg, on the bottom of that leg is a little plastic cap. It's called a glider. And what it will do is give you protection on your floor. So, if somebody plops down on the sofa and it moves around a little bit, it's not gonna cause a scratch. It's gonna give you a little bit of protection. It's also gonna make it relatively easy to sort of slide that furniture around a bit if you need to 'cause it's not gonna stick too much. If you're dealing with carpet, it's kind of a non-issue, right. It's a pressure point, a caster, or a little plastic pad, either way, it's gonna be a pressure point on the carpet so it's kind of six of one, half dozen of the other. But for wood floors, I think, it's an important consideration. That brass metal leg, the wheel, is potentially a source of trouble. It can scratch a floor. I haven't seen it do too much damage, in my experience, but there's that potential and, depending on the hardness of your floors, and how protected they are, you might wanna think about that. I've had a house that had really kind of soft, wood floors in it. I would not put a caster leg on a sofa in that environment because it would totally scuff it up and cause indentations and be all kinds of trouble.

The other thing about caster legs that can be a problem is that it introduces a point of failure, potentially. We have a wood leg and we have, the casters are attached, it's a wheel, it has a little axle and everything, it rotates and then there's a brass cup that sits on the bottom of the leg and is screwed into place. I think that when you join two materials toegether, two different types of material together, there is that potential that there's a failure because you're using screws to hold things together. They're pretty durable. We have a good source for these legs at this point. They're made for us and I think they're high quality, but, you know, if you have an eight year old who likes to swan dive onto the sofa the sofa's gonna tolerate it, it's gonna hold up. It's not a problem, but that little potential failure point to either come undone or cause a scratch on your floor, I don't know if it's worth it.

Here's what I can say. We're happy to build a sofa for you with regular wood legs, send it to you. If you get it, put it in your living room, and say, you know, I just really need, I really need that extra, little, special touch of that little metal caster. Let us know. We'll send you a set of those. We can swap 'em out or you can hold onto the wood legs, whatever. Put those on, it's an easy swap, and you're good to go. So I, you know, I think in the end, it's one of those things that seems like a really cool idea, may not be all that essential. They're really popular in a lot, there are certain furniture companies that use them over and over again. In my experience, those furniture companies do not seem to care a whole lot about what living with their products actually means. I do care about that. I really wanna make sure this works for you long haul, but we can do either, we can talk about it, but think about it carefully as to whether it's something you really want on your sofa.