How to pack for a move, the way the crew actually does it

Start packing earlier than feels necessary

The single most common packing mistake is not bad wrapping. It is starting too late. A three-bedroom house holds more boxes than most people expect; if you want to work out how many boxes you will need, the calculator does it in about a minute. One of our packing jobs found an airing cupboard that had quietly absorbed eighteen years of spare bedding, and that cupboard alone filled four boxes.

A box a day from four weeks out beats a panicked weekend every time. Start where you will miss things least: loft, garage, shed, spare room, then books and out-of-season clothes. Declutter as you go, because as our moving house checklist says, every box you do not pack is a box nobody pays to move.

The boxes and packing materials worth paying for

You do not need everything the packaging aisle sells. You need a short list of things that work:

• Double-walled boxes in two sizes. Small for heavy (books, tins, tools), large for light (bedding, lampshades, toys). The HomeOwners Alliance packing guide gives the rule we repeat on every job: "Don't pack heavy items into big boxes as you'll end up with something you cannot lift."
• Proper packing tape and a tape gun. Supermarket sticky tape gives up in transit. Tape every seam, and double-tape the bottom of anything heavy.
• Packing paper over newspaper. Newsprint ink transfers onto china and stays there. Plain paper costs little and saves an afternoon of scrubbing grey smudges off your wedding plates.
• Your own towels, bedding and socks. Free padding you are moving anyway. Towels wrap frames and mirrors; socks pad glasses; duvets cushion the awkward gaps in boxes.
• A marker pen per packer. If the pen has to be found, the box does not get labelled.

Used boxes are fine if they are dry, square and double-walled. Supermarket banana boxes are none of those things by the time you get them.

The room-by-room packing order

Pack in reverse order of how much you use each room. This is the order our crews follow on a full pack, and it works just as well spread over a month:

1. Loft, garage, shed. Rarely touched, often heavy, best done while energy is high.
2. Spare rooms and bookcases. Books go in small boxes, spines alternating, never over 15kg a box.
3. Out-of-season everything. Winter coats in summer, garden cushions in winter.
4. Ornaments, pictures and the good china. Fragile work needs daylight and patience, not a 10pm panic.
5. Wardrobes and drawers. Leave soft clothes in drawers if the furniture is sturdy; we wrap and move many chests as they are.
6. Kitchen, last. Keep one pan, two plates and the kettle out until the final evening.

How to pack fragiles: plates, glasses and the heirloom problem

Fragile breakages almost always come from one of three errors: items touching each other, items able to move, or heavy boxes crushing light ones. Fix those three and you have fixed packing. The method:

• Plates travel on their edge, like records, never flat in a stack. Wrap each plate in paper, bundle four or five, and stand the bundle upright on a cushioned base of scrunched paper.
• Glasses and mugs get stuffed first, paper or a sock inside each one, then wrapped. Heaviest glasses at the bottom of the box, stemware on top, and the box marked FRAGILE on every face.
• Mirrors and framed pictures get a towel wrap, then cardboard on both faces, then they travel standing up between soft items. One large mirror on a job in Cannock looked like trouble from the start, so it was wrapped, boarded and loaded separately. It arrived without a mark.
• Fill every gap. A box that rattles when shaken is a box that breaks in the van. Scrunched paper costs seconds.

Labelling that survives moving day

The British Association of Removers gives the same instruction in its guide to moving home that we give every customer: "Label everything clearly. Mark boxes with the room they belong in and a short description of contents." Two additions from our crew make that advice work even harder:

• Label the destination room, not the origin room. "Back bedroom" at the new house, even if the box was packed in the study. The crew unloading has never seen your old house.
• Label two sides and the top. Boxes get stacked. A label on one side has a three-in-four chance of facing the wrong way.

Number the boxes if you want the gold-standard version: a numbered list on your phone means you know a box is missing before the van leaves, not three weeks later.

The essentials box: pack it last, find it first

One box does not go in the van. Kettle, mugs, tea, chargers, medication, toilet roll, snacks, a screwdriver and the paperwork folder. It rides in your car and gets opened first. One of our packers labels it "tea first", which says everything about its job description.

Pack yourself or book a packing service?

Honest answer: most people can pack most of a house themselves with the method above, and for a small move that is exactly what I would suggest. A professional packing service earns its money in three situations:

• Time. A crew packs a three-bedroom house in a day. The same job solo, around work and children, swallows three weekends.
• Fragile-heavy homes. Collections, glassware, art. On one Birmingham flat job every piece of glass was wrapped individually, and the customer checked twice because she did not believe nothing had broken.
• Insurance. Goods packed by the owner are usually covered differently from goods packed by the firm. If the crew packed it, the crew owns the outcome. Ask any remover how their cover treats owner-packed boxes; it is a question worth asking us too.

Either way, the move itself runs the same: see what happens on moving day for the hour-by-hour version.