Which would be more valuable for moving heavy objects (furniture etc) in, out & around a condo?
A hand truck, or a dolly?
As I understand it, they are both the same thing by different names. I call it a Hand truck.
Of course, there’s the furniture dolly, that may have two wheels or four.
Hand truck–upright, & metal.
Dolly–flat wooden platform with wheels. Often stronger, always cheaper, but not always easier to use.
On target as always Chefguy
A dolly where the handle can be removed and moved turning it into a hand truck?
Thank you, drives me nuts (you can nitpick all you want) when people call the upright thing with the two wheels a dolly. BTW, if you’ve never used a hand truck before, it does take a little bit of learning. There’s a trick to scooping things up (tip them back and kick the handtruck under them), there’s a trick to unloading them (put your foot under the metal bar and pull it out), there’s a trick to tipping really heavy things back (wedge your foot on the bar like you’re holding a door closed and have someone push it over on you. Pull it over bumps, don’t push it doesn’t upright itself and go all the way over and a few other things.
Oh, and then there’s furniture movers, hand trucks with a kickstand thing. Super helpful for moving heavy stuff a long way.
But if you’re just trying to move things around a condo, one time, not that often, those plastic ‘moving men’ or ‘furniture movers’ that you can pick up at places like BB&B work pretty well for things like heavy chairs and couches. Moves them right over most surfaces. I keep a set just for when I need to, say, move my bed around to clean under it.
If you need to move things up and down stairs you’ll have to get a hand truck, a dolly won’t work for that, a hand truck can go up and down stairs. Get one with inflatable stairs, it’s easier to use and won’t mark up your floors as much.
IME, a hand truck is easier to use and much better for going up/down stairs. A dolly is somewhat more versatile and is especially useful for moving exceedingly large, heavy objects, like safes or refrigerators. I’d go with the hand truck if I could only pick one.
if moving especially taller heavy stuff down stairs then an appliance hand truck is best.
Where I grew up, a hand truck was called a “dolly.” When I worked on a construction site, it was called a “two wheel truck” or just “two wheeler”. If you called it a “dolly” they laughed at you. Any kind of cart with four wheels was called a “four wheel truck,” or “four wheeler.”
Then there’s the Pallet Jack. From my days working on a loading dock, I remember these also referred to as “hand trucks” or “dollys”.
If you want to be macho about it, you could always use a Johnson bar.
There’s a larger hand truck that’s the best to use. It might be called an appliance truck [or appliance hand truck]. It looks like a standard 2 wheeled hand truck but there’s a longer bottom piece that’ll flip down so what you’re moving can rest on more of 10" of base. And there’s a strap or 2 you wrap around whatever you’re moving and tighten it. I moved just over a year ago and one of these came with the truck I rented. It was great!
I bought one of these at a garage sale many years ago. Great tool - not something I need often but really, really handy if one has the space to store it. I’ve used it several times in situations where I would have otherwise had to enlist the help of two or three strong people, and have loaned it to friends. Plus with a hand truck you can get large bulky items up and down stairs with relative ease.
I was in a band when I was a weeeee bit younger. We were all-in so we owned our own PA system and had a big truck to haul it (and the rest of our gear) all around in.
Though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, we kinda sucked. We had no roadies. We WERE our roadies. I’ve described it as moving a two bedroom apartment twice a week. Good times.
We had several hand trucks to help to move the things we couldn’t pack into a flight case with casters. For the super, super-heavy stuff (e.g. the amplifier racks) we used a dolly like the one described above. As far as I knew, they were called “refrigerator dollys” though I s’pose they can move all different sorts of super-heavy stuff.
Yeah. That’s my post. A reminiscence of moving tons of gear around twice a week.
Yea.
Guys–the whole idea is to buy an item for furniture, that would be used rarely.
Not pallet jacks.
The convertible hand truck that doubles as a dolly sounds good.
I’ve seen “dolly” used for both, with hand truck used just for the version with a handle.
When I was working construction, ~40 years ago in northern Virginia, the terms were used interchangeably.
And if you have a vending machine in your condo use this.