Earthquake safety and/or home childproofing tip: prevent your furniture from tipping over WITHOUT the hassle of drilling a bunch of holes into the wall!

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Background:

When arranging furniture in a house, people generally tend to just put tall furniture (bookshelves, wardrobes, etc…) against a wall and just sort of hope that none of it falls over.

Normally, this is a reasonable assumption, except during rare situations such as earthquakes or small children climbing up a bookshelf like a ladder.

The Issue:

Unfortunately, since earthquakes and children both exist, it is possible for otherwise-stable furnishings to come crashing down, laying waste to the countryside (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Normally, this furniture is just fine (top). But if an earthquake occurs, everything is going to fall all over the place (bottom).

There is simple solution to this: drill an anchor into a wall, then attach the piece of furniture with a short metal wire. However, this process is JUST annoying enough that people often don’t bother to secure their furniture, even in earthquake-prone areas. The attachment wires are also usually quite short (by design), so it means it’s laborious to move furniture around after it’s been attached to the wall.

Proposal:

There’s a rarely-seen interior design element called a a “picture rail moulding” (https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+hanging+wall+moulding): basically, a little “lip” at the top of the wall where you can attach a wire for hanging a picture. (Fancy old houses and art museums use these.) This picture-hanging technology enables a person to non-destructively hang / move art without having to constantly drill and patch holes in the wall.

What we need is a similar system for earthquake-proofing! Imagine if every wall had a securely-attached metal rail that furniture could be easily attached to in a clip-on/clip-off manner (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: The “quake rail” (blue) is just a metal rail that is solidly attached to the wall. We can then attach our furniture to the rail with short lengths of wire (shown in orange).

A possible implementation of the furniture-support rail is shown in Figure 3.

Fig. 3: This is basically just a U-shaped piece of metal (see https://www.google.com/search?q=unistrut+channel for specifics). Although this example doesn’t show it, there are versions of this idea that allow you to insert/remove the orange block without having to slide it all the way in from an end.

Conclusion:

This would greatly increase the likelihood that someone would secure their furniture!

PROS: A good feature to add if you happen to be doing any remodeling in a region of the world where earthquakes or children exist.

CONS: Might be difficult to come up with an aesthetically-tolerable version of this highly industrial metal rail system. Or would it be? Maybe it would be easy! Someone should give it a try, anyway.

Originally published 2025-03-17.