When I first wrote this article, I'd just found a viral hack that promised to make laying a rug under a couch, or a cabinet, a lot easier. I'd usually have had to move all my furniture out of the room to lay a new area rug, or even to take a rug up to clean it.
The solution, according to TikTok, was a 'ceramic tile lifter', which you can find on Amazon, which you can use as a 'jack' to lift your sofa so that you can place your floor covering with your ideal rug placement in mind. The promised result? An end to bunched-up rugs that never quite sit perfectly. Without it, the shape of the rug might end up distorted, or the edges won't sit flat – whatever the symptoms, you would have been sure to find me on my hands and knees trying to push out creases, vainly trying to get it to sit pretty.
