Moving is a chore few people look forward to. It’s hard on your back, your pocketbook and, at times, your sanity. The good news is, there are a few techniques you can utilize to make your move a little easier. And quite a few of them center around simply knowing how to pack for a move.
Hopefully, you’re off to a good start because you’ve already read our guides to gathering the right packing materials but there are still other tips and tricks for packing that will make your job quicker, easier, and less difficult on your body.
Read on to learn our best our best hacks for packing. Moving will never be as difficult again.
1. Get Your Boxes Early
The earlier you plan ahead and gather your boxes, the earlier you can start packing. Our handy moving checklist even has tips for where you can get moving boxes for free.
2. Purge Before You Pack
Chances are there a number of things in your current home that you won’t need or want at the next. This may include clothes that don’t fit or are out of style, duplicate items, or gifts that weren’t your style.
Get rid of these items before you start packing. Hold a garage sale, give them to family or friends or donate them to charity so you’ll have less to pack up at the old house and unpack in the new one.
3. Pick Your Boxes Carefully
Choosing the correct size boxes is perhaps the single most important part of packing. If you fill a large size box with heavy books or cast iron pans, chances are you won’t be able to lift or move it. It will just sit there on the floor and you’ll be forced to unpack it and transfer the contents to smaller boxes.
If you must use a large box for heavy items, place a few on the bottom, and then fill the remainder of the box with lighter goods such as pillows and linens.
4. Reinforce Your Boxes
Speaking of heavy objects, the last thing you want to do is worry about the contents of your box busting through the bottom as you make your way out to the moving truck. Don’t let that happen! Reinforce the bottom of your boxes with heavy duty tape before you fill them.
5. Elevate Your Boxes
Repetitive stooping and bending are hard on your body. It’s part of what makes you so achy and sore when you move. Although there is probably no way to eliminate the need for it entirely, you can reduce the need for stooping and bending by lifting your boxes off the floor and setting them on a bed, tabletop or counter while you pack.
6. Ask For Childcare Assistance
If you have older children, put them to work! But if you have young children hire a babysitter, or ask a family or friend to keep the kids occupied for the day. Small children will understandably bore and tire of watching you pack. Not only are they likely to distract you from your mission but you could be packing things like knives that could pose a safety issue should you turn your back.
7. Pack Boxes Specifically By Room
Many online guides will suggest you wrap items like dishes and glassware inside clothes and bath towels to save on packing paper. This is a terrible idea! You can easily use recycled newspapers as packing paper, which means you aren’t saving yourself any money. But worse yet, you’d be creating a lot of additional work when forced to traipse around your new home and distribute each item to its proper place.
Be sure to keep each box dedicated to a single room. You’ll thank yourself when the unpacking begins.
8. Label Your Boxes
Most people label their boxes by room name and make an additional note in cases of fragile/breakable contents. We suggest being even more specific than that. Instead of merely labeling your box with the words kitchen, write kitchen/coffee cups. Or kitchen/flatware. This will help you find the contents of your boxes when you need them and help you prioritize your unpacking since the average person is too busy and exhausted to unpack all of their boxes in a single day.
9. Use Clear Sandwich Bags For Small Hardware
There is nothing worse than being exhausted and unable to assemble your bed because you can’t find all the pieces. When you disassemble a piece of furniture, keep in mind it will have to be assembled again in your new home. Storing those small pieces in clear plastic baggies will make them easy to find. Just be sure to label which box there are in so you won’t have to needlessly dig through multiple boxes to find them.
10. Exercise Safety When Packing Your Knives
Knives are sharp. That’s why we use them to cut things. This necessitates extreme precaution when packing them for a move. Remember, everything you pack, will need to be unpacked, and not necessarily by you. This means that if your knives are carelessly thrown in the bottom of a box or wrapped in towels or oven mitts they can cut the unsuspecting hands that seek to unpack them.
If you store your knives in a knife block, secure them into place with sturdy tape. Then wrap them in newspaper clearly labeled with the word, “knives”, before you pack them away. If you don’t have a knife block, place your knives in a sturdy, shallow box, wrapped in heavy-duty tape.
Under no circumstances should knives be mixed into the contents of any other boxes without being clearly labeled or and the sharp edges rendered ineffective.
11. Use Plastic Bags In Addition To Boxes
Boxes are great for sharp, heavy objects, but they take up a great deal of space in your moving truck. If you put soft goods like pillows and linens into garbage bags instead, you can use them to fill in nooks, crannies, and cracks in between stacks of boxes in your moving truck.
12. Leave Clothes On The Hangers
This is another place where garbage bags come in handy. If you leave your clothes on their hangers they’ll be much easier hang in your new home. Bundle them together and pull a garbage bag over each grouping to keep them clean and protected, poking the handle through at the top.
This is another place where garbage bags come in handy. If you leave your clothes on their hangers they’ll be much easier hang in your new home. Bundle them together and pull a garbage bag over each grouping to keep them clean and protected, poking the handle through at the top.
13. Bundle Together Your Wires
As tempting as it might be to throw all of your wires into a box, that may might it difficult to marry them to the proper piece of equipment again. Once you unhook your electronics for your television, stereo, game system, computer, etc., bundle them together with taps and clearly mark them with the word television (or wherever they belong). And when you put them in boxes, those boxes should of course, be clearly labeled to indicate the wires lay within.
14. Take Special Care When Warranted
If you’re moving a flat screen television, you’ll want to make sure you exercise extreme precaution. If you still have the boxes, use them to move your electronics. If you don’t, wrap them with sturdy cardboard, blankets or towels. Move flats screen or plasma screens in an upright position. Laying them on their side can cause permanent damage. If you no longer have the brochure or manufacturer’s guidelines available look them up in line to make sure you don’t do anything that may result in nulling your warranty.
15. Use Everything
If you’re bringing hampers, suitcases, and baskets to your new home, be sure to purpose them and fill them with linens and clothes. There’s no point in wasting that very useful space.
16. Ask For Help
No one wants to be a bother to friends or family but guess what? If those people offer to help you, they mean it! Take them up on those offers, spring for the pizza, and make a party out of it your packing day.
17. Don’t Pack Everything
That’s right. There’s one thing you shouldn’t pack until you’re completely moved out.
18. Pack An Overnight Bag
Chances are you’ll be too exhausted to fully unpack when you finally move everything into your new home. Having an overnight bag containing your sheets, toiletries, night clothes, and an outfit for the next day will feel like nothing short of a small, welcome miracle.
19. Pack Your Coffee Maker And Breakfast Dishes Separately
If you plan to wake up in your new home there will probably nothing more pressing on your mind than to ascertain the location of your coffee maker in the morning. Save yourself the stress. Pack all of your breakfast essentials together so they’ll be easy to locate.
We hope this list of packing tips helps make your move easier and less stressful. But most of all, we hope you and yours enjoy the new home. Just let us know where we should send your housewarming gift. Here’s to year after year of happy memories. Salud!
