Moving house can be an incredibly stressful time in your life. Adapting to a new environment, meeting new neighbours, and filling out massive amounts of paperwork are just a few of the crucial things you have to consider before deciding to relocate.

However, packing and transporting the contents of your house is an additional stress that many people often overlook.

Without proper organisation, belongings can get mixed up or lost, delicate items like crockery or electronics can be damaged, and sometimes entire boxes can go missing.

To help minimise the stress of moving, we’ve put together seven top tips to show our customers how to pack and move house easily.

7 Top Tips For Packing To Move House

Have A Plan and Start Early

The best way to pack a house for moving is to start early.

You should start the packing process about a month before your moving date. This will give you plenty of breathing room to ensure that items don’t get missed or mislabeled and end up in the wrong place.

The extra time will also allow you to plan how you want to pack your items. It’s usually best to have multiple boxes per room and to use these boxes exclusively for the rooms you’ve designated.

Designating boxes and packing one room at a time is a straightforward packing solution that can help prevent you from getting overwhelmed. Depending on the size of your house, you can purchase a variety of packing kits, including two-bedroom, three-bedroom, or large-house packing kits, to ensure you have an appropriate amount of storage for your belongings.

Invest In Quality Packing Materials

Although you may be tempted to ask for spare boxes from supermarkets or friends on social media, the materials that you receive will often be used, damaged, and come in a variety of different sizes and shapes, which can hamper your ability to organise and increase your stress levels.

Instead, consider investing in high-quality double-walled boxes, quality bubble wrap and strong packaging tape when packing up your home. This will give you the best possible tools for packing to move house and help your treasured items stay safe during their journey.

Protect Fragile Items With Bubble Wrap and Foam Roll

Although it may seem obvious, fragile items such as mirrors, televisions, crockery, and decorations are at a high risk of breaking during the moving process. By choosing the right packaging materials, you can help minimise this damage. In particular, it is a great idea to invest in:

• Bubble Wrap: Bubble wrap is ideal for wrapping delicate items, such as glassware. The air-filled plastic bubbles help absorb shock and limit movement, giving your fragile items the best chance to arrive intact. 
• Foam Roll: Foam roll has fewer general uses than bubble wrap, but is exceptional when it comes to preventing scratches and abrasions. If you have delicate, fragile material like crystal or valuable items like tablets or other high-end electronics, securing these surfaces with a foam roll can prevent them from getting scratched. In addition, you can also layer pieces of foam roll between crockery or glassware to minimise movement and avoid scratching.
• Edge Protectors: Adding cardboard edge protectors to your inventory is an excellent way of protecting televisions and mirrors in particular. By adding these to the edges of fragile items, you are minimising the damage caused by minor bumps or shaking in transit. Although edge protectors cannot protect against significant drops, they can help reduce damage.

Use The Right-Sized Boxes

It can be tempting to use large boxes to pack heavy items to maximise space. However, overfilling large boxes with weighty items means that the box itself will quickly become too heavy to lift, and when it can be lifted, it may buckle under the additional weight.

Instead, try filling large boxes with light but bulky items, such as bed sheets and pillows, to maximise space while minimising strain. Keep heavier items, such as tools or books, in smaller boxes, which can help limit their overall weight and provide greater control when handling.

Choose the Perfect Packaging Tape

Different packing tapes serve other purposes, and this should be something you bear in mind when packing up your home.

When sealing boxes, strong brown parcel tape is a great, classic choice that helps ensure your packages remain sealed and secure in transit.

However, paper tape, including gummed paper tape, provides some unique advantages for moving that are worth considering. For example, because paper tape is generally not laminated, this means that you can write on the back with most marker pens. This will make it easier to label boxes for specific rooms, and water-activated gummed tape can also serve as an anti-tamper seal, ensuring that no one has opened the boxes before you get the chance.

Pack A Box For The Car

A massive concern that people have when moving is losing their most precious possessions. From important documents like passports and certificates to sentimental family items like jewellery, the thought of losing irreplaceable items can often be the scariest when packing up your home.

To alleviate this anxiety, begin your packing process by selecting a small box (one that will fit on your lap) and filling it with the most essential items in your home. By ensuring that these items are never out of sight on moving day, you can travel with less stress and anxiety than if they were packed away in the moving van.

Finally, when packing your car box, make sure to add your favourite snacks and drinks. Keeping your energy levels high will help with moving and unpacking. Choosing some of your favourite snacks can also give you something to look forward to throughout the process.

Pack an Essentials Box

Finally, when packing, pack a box with the items you may want as soon as you arrive.

A kettle, a selection of mugs, toilet paper, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and your phone chargers are all items that you might want as soon as you arrive, so packing a separate box with these items (as well as any others that are personal to you) is a great way to make moving as easy as possible.

When loading the van, it’s also a great idea to pack this box last: that way, your essentials box will be the first to get unpacked, leaving you with everything you need to continue unpacking successfully.

Make Your Move As Stress-Free As Possible By Choosing The Right Packing Material

Packing to move house can be a frustrating and challenging process. The stress and anxiety of leaving your home and learning to adapt to a new environment can be scary, and this can be made even harder without a clear plan or process for packing up your home.

If you are looking for high-quality packing materials, including specially designed sets of home-moving boxes, consider browsing our range of packaging materials to find the perfect solution for your needs.If you have any questions about our products or would like to discuss placing a bulk order, please don’t hesitate to contact our team at info@schottpackaging.co.uk.