How the box count is worked out
Each room has an average box count taken from the sizing tables rental and moving companies publish — a kitchen is around eighteen medium-box equivalents, a bedroom around ten, a living room around twelve — and that gets scaled by how full the room is and, for bedrooms, by how many you have.
The result is an estimate for boxed goods only. Furniture, mattresses, bikes and the contents of the garage that will not go in a box are separate, which is why the cubic feet figure is useful when you are sizing a truck or a container: add roughly half again for furniture on top of it.
Buy about ten percent more than the number. Most suppliers take unused boxes back, and running out at nine on a Sunday evening costs a trip you cannot afford at that point in a move.
Half your boxes should be small
This looks wrong to almost everyone and it is right.
Small ~45% books, tools, tinned food, anything dense
Medium ~35% most things
Large ~20% bedding, pillows, lampshades — volume with no weight
The rule is that box size should be inversely proportional to what goes in it. A large box of books weighs more than anyone should carry, does not fit through the grip of a normal pair of hands, and eventually loses its bottom on a staircase.
If you take one thing from this page: books go in small boxes, always.
The packing rules that actually prevent damage
Plates on their edges. Like records, with paper between each, padded top and bottom. Stacked flat, plates crack under their own weight over an hour of road vibration. On edge they very rarely do.
Fill every gap. A box that rattles is a box whose contents move against each other for the whole journey. Paper, towels, bedding — anything.
Tape every lid and bag every liquid. Heat and pressure in a truck open bottles that have never leaked at home.
Photograph cabling before you unplug anything. The back of the television, the router, the desk. Ten seconds each, half an hour saved at the other end.
Label the side, not the top. Boxes get stacked. A label on top is invisible the moment something is put on it.
The three boxes that do not go on the truck
Open-first. Kettle, mugs, toilet roll, soap, towels, chargers, scissors, a knife, bin bags, shower curtain, medication. Coloured tape nothing else uses.
Tools. A screwdriver, an allen key and a knife. You will need to reassemble a bed before you need anything else, and the tool box will otherwise be at the back of the truck under the garden furniture.
Comfort box, if there are children. The favourite toy, the blanket, the night light. It is the difference between a hard first night and an impossible one.
Number every box
Write a number on the side and a line in the box log: number, room, roughly what is in it, and whether it is wanted early.
Two things come out of that. First, you can count boxes off the truck while it is still there rather than discovering something is missing a week later, when the claim is much harder. Second, on the first night you can find the coffee filters without opening eleven boxes.
Sixteen lines are on the printed log; print two copies for a whole house.
The room where the real saving is
The basement, the attic, or wherever the boxes from the last move ended up.
A box that moved house last time and was never opened does not need to move again. This is where nearly all of the money and effort of a move can be removed, and it is also the room people leave until last — by which point there is no time to make decisions and it all goes on the truck.
Do that room first, six weeks out, when you can still afford to think about it.
The cheapest box is the one you do not pack. Every hour spent deciding what is not coming saves more than an hour of packing, carrying, and unpacking it at the other end.