Sloping floors do not discriminate: Tables teeter, dressers lean, and chairs wobble in fifth-floor walk-ups and sprawling farmhouses alike. They are nearly impossible to avoid in old homes, a somewhat normal occurrence after enduring decades of people cooking and dancing and living. They can even have a certain charm to them if you prefer the look and feel of old homes to newer construction. “Embrace the sloping floor,” says Bill Cummings of Heiberg Cummings Design. “I find these kind of irregularities to embody the soul of an old house.” (He practices what he preaches, too: Bill and his partner, Bernt Heiberg, recently restored a 183-year-old clapboard cottage on Long Island for themselves with the singular purpose of preserving the original architecture.)
But sloping floors do present a few dilemmas: Are they structurally sound? Will your furniture even stand still? Does one side of your stove get more heat than the other? And how can you combat the slope if you love everything else about a space but can’t (or don’t want to) go through a gut renovation?
Simplest fix: Add feet to the furniture
If the uneven floor in question is structurally sound, you can combat its slope by simply attaching adjustable feet—also called "furniture levelers" and easily acquired at any local hardware store or on Amazon—to the legs. “I actually think about the subject quite a lot,” says Ivy Siosi, furniture designer behind Siosi Design in Bloomington, Indiana. “As a designer of fine furniture and a lover of old houses, I always incorporate leveling feet on the bottoms of pieces that would otherwise be susceptible to even the slightest of uneven ground.” She screws dual-threaded brass inserts (like these) into each leg and then screws customized elevator bolts (like this, with a felt pad on the underside) into those; the latter component can then be twisted one way to raise and the other to lower. The same custom combo—or an inexpensive, ready-made version—could be applied to the feet of your existing furniture pretty easily. Attach them by making a pilot hole with a power drill. They'll fly under the radar this way, and will be even less of an eyesore if you choose the same color or a nice-looking metal. You can attach felt pads to the bottom, too, so there’s no scratching the floor.
Yes, you could also stack coins under a wonky table leg or try the old beer-cap-with-a-nail-through-it trick (which Ivy admits she sometimes employs), but adjustable legs are way more polished. Ivy likes how they give an attractive finished appearance by casting a small shadow at the base of a piece.
Custom solutions: Get to the heart of the problem
“We work in so many old buildings that uneven floors are a common problem,” says Brad Sherman, a partner at FLOAT Studio in New York. “Whenever we're designing furniture or sourcing for spaces that have this problem, we always make sure to use adjustable furniture feet.” But sometimes a more custom solution is either needed or sought after, as when Brad “removed the legs from a sofa and made a new solid wood platform to combat the slope” for a recent project in Brooklyn. While adding a very tailored touch to an older space, custom solutions like built-in furniture and this bespoke platform are of course going to beget higher costs—and unless you're very handy, the involvement of a professional. If it's more a structural concern and you have a basement, it might be worth hiring a carpenter to do a little light work like jacking up the sagging joists and sistering them with new components. A good contractor can help you decide which fix is best for your situation—when it comes to floors, DIY can be more trouble than it’s worth.
