Essential Items for Moving

Buy these first

There is a version of this list that runs forty items long. Here is the version that matters. If you had one trip and one cart, this is what goes in it.

Everything else on this page is refinement. This is the part where skipping an item costs you real time on move day.

• A tape gun with a serrated blade, plus six or more rolls of two-inch clear packing tape. Not office tape, not duct tape, not masking tape — duct tape adhesive lets go in a hot truck and leaves residue on the carton.
• Two ten-pound bundles of clean newsprint packing paper. Newspaper ink transfers onto china, white ceramic, and unglazed pottery, and it does not come back off.
• One roll of eighteen-inch stretch wrap for drawers, cords, lids, and anything that wants to swing open mid-carry.
• Small boxes, roughly twice as many as you think you need. Heavy things go in small boxes. That is the entire rule, and almost every packing failure is a violation of it.
• A fat black marker on a lanyard or a loop of string. A marker you set down is a marker you have lost.
• A retractable box cutter and a roll of blue painter's tape, for labeling surfaces you do not want to write on.
• Four furniture sliders and four ratchet straps. Together they cost less than one gouged floorboard or one dented tailgate.

Boxes: four sizes do nearly all the work

Movers size boxes by volume, not by dimension, which is why you will see cubic feet on the side rather than inches. What matters to you is the pairing of volume and density: a large box is for bulky and light, a small box is for dense and heavy. A large box packed with books weighs more than most people can safely lift, and its bottom seam will fail somewhere between the hallway and the truck.

Keep a loaded carton under about fifty pounds. A book box that feels reasonable at forty pounds feels very different on the twelfth trip down a flight of stairs.

Fill to the top every time. A box with a hollow at the top will collapse under whatever gets stacked on it, and a box with rattling space inside lets its contents beat against each other for the whole drive. Crumpled paper is not filler, it is structure.

How much tape, paper, and wrap to actually buy

The most common supply mistake is buying a sensible-looking amount of everything and then making three more trips during the week you have the least time. Buy long, and return what you do not open.

The figures below are planning estimates for a typical two-bedroom home. Scale down for a studio, and add roughly half again for a three-bedroom with a full garage. A kitchen alone will consume more paper than the rest of the house combined.

Let us do the supply math.

Walk us through the rooms and the stairs and you get one number, locked, before a single box is taped.

Price my move

The specialty items worth buying instead of improvising

Six items do a specific job that no amount of newspaper and hope will replicate. Each of them exists because a particular category of belonging breaks in a particular way.

A dish barrel is double-walled for a reason. Plates travel on edge, standing vertically like records in a crate, each one wrapped individually and then bundled in threes. Flat-stacked plates crack because the load transfers through their centers. On edge, the force runs through the strongest part of the plate.

Framed art and mirrors go in telescoping picture cartons with foam corner protectors, never face to face without a spacer between them. Run tape across the face of mirror glass in a wide X. That does not prevent a break, but it holds the shards together if one happens, which is the difference between a bad afternoon and a trip for stitches.

Televisions ride upright, always. A panel laid flat flexes across its own diagonal every time the truck hits a seam in the freeway, and the failure shows up as a line of dead pixels a week later. If you kept the original carton with its molded foam, this is the day it earns the closet space it has been occupying.

• Dish barrels with cell dividers for stemware, and foam pouches for anything with a stem or a handle
• Telescoping mirror and picture cartons, plus foam corner protectors
• A television box, or the original carton, and a soft cloth for the screen face
• Heavy mattress bags in 5 mil, taped closed at both ends
• Wardrobe boxes, which double as fast, no-fold packing for closets and for dress uniforms
• Sealable plastic bins for anything that must stay dry, and for the garage items you will unpack last

Labeling: fifteen minutes that saves you a weekend

Label the side of the box, not the top. Once boxes are stacked three high in a garage, the tops are invisible and you will end up opening things at random to find the coffee filters.

Write three things on two adjacent sides: the destination room, two or three words of contents, and a number. Keep the numbers in a note on your phone with a slightly longer description. Numbering costs seconds per box and turns the question of where something is into a search rather than an excavation.

Buy colored tape in one color per room and put a matching strip on the doorframe at the new place before the truck arrives. A crew that has never seen your floor plan will place every box correctly without asking, which is worth more than it sounds like when there are four people carrying at once.

Mark FRAGILE and THIS SIDE UP on the sides, not the lid, and reserve one clear label — OPEN FIRST — for the two or three boxes that hold the first evening's needs.

San Diego adds its own items to the list

The coast makes specific demands. In La Jolla, the streets off Nautilus and through Bird Rock are narrow enough and the driveways steep enough that a full-size truck often cannot stage at your door, which means a longer carry from wherever it can legally park. Add extra floor runners, a hand truck with pneumatic wheels rather than hard plastic, and wheel chocks if anything is being loaded on a slope. Long carries also mean more handling per item, which means padding matters more, not less.

Downtown and Mission Valley high-rises run on reservations. Most buildings require a booked freight elevator window and a certificate of insurance naming the building and its management company before they will hand over the elevator key. Ask the management office what they need, and give them the mover's USDOT number when they ask for it — ours is 4329208, we are licensed and insured, and we carry one million dollars in liability coverage with one hundred thousand in cargo coverage, which is what those forms are asking about. Check the garage clearance too. Plenty of San Diego parking structures will not admit a box truck, and that is better discovered a week early than at eight in the morning.

Heat is the quiet one. A closed trailer parked in the sun on an inland run toward El Cajon or Santee gets far hotter than the air outside. Candles, crayons, vinyl records, chocolate, cosmetics, pressed supplements, and most medications should ride in your own car with the air conditioning on. On the coast the opposite applies in the morning: the marine layer leaves driveways damp, and cardboard left sitting on wet concrete softens at the corners within an hour. Stage boxes on a tarp or a pallet, not on the ground.

For a PCS move out of Coronado or Miramar, keep your own numbered inventory alongside the official one and photograph high-value items before they are wrapped. Box and label professional gear separately from household goods rather than mixing them, and use wardrobe boxes for dress uniforms so they arrive hanging instead of creased. Orders, medical records, and anything you would have to explain the loss of should travel on your person. If your report date lands on a holiday or a Sunday, that is workable — we run 24/7, holidays included.

We have done this street before.

Long carries, steep driveways, booked elevators and building paperwork — 10,000+ moves in, none of it is new to us.

Check my date

The box you never load

Pack one bin that rides in your own vehicle and never touches the truck. Not because a mover will lose it, but because at nine at night in an empty house, you should not be opening boxes to find a phone charger.

This bin holds the essentials for the first twenty-four hours plus the items that should not be handed to anyone: passports, birth certificates, titles, the folder of closing or lease documents, prescriptions, jewelry, cash, keys, and laptops.

Separately, there is a short list of things that legally cannot go on a moving truck, and knowing it now avoids an argument later. Propane tanks, gasoline, kerosene, charcoal lighter fluid, aerosols, paint and paint thinner, pool chemicals, fertilizer, ammunition, fire extinguishers, and automotive batteries all stay behind. Drain the gas from the mower and the trimmer a few days out so the tanks have time to air.

Perishable food is the other one. Empty and defrost the refrigerator at least a full day ahead, prop the door open so it dries, and give away the freezer contents rather than gambling on how long a cooler holds temperature during a coastal-to-inland drive.

• Phone chargers, a power strip, and a small flashlight
• Toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, and a shower curtain with rings
• One set of sheets and one towel per person, packed together so nobody hunts
• Basic tools: screwdrivers, an adjustable wrench, an Allen key set, scissors
• Trash bags, a box cutter, cleaning spray, and a sponge
• Medications, pet food and bowls, and a day of clothes per person
• Documents, valuables, keys, and anything irreplaceable

Austin and Dallas ask for a different kit

Texas rewrites this list mostly through heat, and it holds that heat for a much longer stretch of the year than the coast does. The first consequence is where you pack. In suburban houses around Plano, Cedar Park and Round Rock, the garage is the obvious staging area and in summer it is the worst room on the property — a closed garage runs hotter than the air outside it, and so does a truck sitting in a driveway with its doors shut. Pack inside where the air conditioning is, and carry out in batches instead of building a wall of cartons in the garage a week early. Buy better tape than you would elsewhere, too. Thin bargain rolls lose their grip in that kind of heat and the bottom seam opens somewhere between the doorway and the tailgate.

Humidity is the quieter change. Books swell, paper curls, labels lift, and anything sealed keeps whatever moisture went in with it. Plastic bins are worth more here than on the coast, with one condition: seal nothing damp. Linens out of a dryer that did not quite finish, a shower curtain, a wetsuit, patio cushions that sat out overnight — all of them need to be dry before the lid goes on or the bag gets taped, and that goes double for mattress bags and vacuum bags, which are airtight by design. Add a handful of silica packs to the bins holding leather, photographs, instruments and documents. If none of this sounds like a good use of your week, a packing crew arrives with its own materials and makes the arithmetic someone else's problem.

Scale is the third difference, and it changes quantity more than technique. A house here usually comes with a deep garage, an attic and a yard, so buy more small boxes and more sealable bins than a condo checklist would suggest, and plan on the garage consuming a day by itself. Attics are hot storage; anything you pull down in August has been sitting in the hottest air in the house and deserves a look before it gets packed rather than after it arrives. The upside of the sprawl is access. Wide streets and long driveways mean a full-size truck usually parks at your door, which is a luxury a coastal hillside street does not offer.

Two access exceptions are worth handling early. Master-planned and gated neighborhoods often run truck entry through a management office or a gate that needs advance notice, so make that call before move day rather than from a callbox with the clock running. And in downtown Austin, Uptown and Deep Ellum, the mid-rise and high-rise buildings run on booked freight elevator windows and certificate-of-insurance paperwork, same as any dense downtown. Ask the building what it needs, give them our USDOT number — 4329208 — when they ask for it, and confirm the dock or garage will actually take a box truck.

Spring weather is the last item on the Texas list. Storms and hail move in fast in both metros, which is reason enough to keep a tarp, a few contractor bags and a roll of stretch wrap within arm's reach, and reason enough not to leave cardboard standing on a driveway while you wait. Distance matters too. Dallas–Fort Worth spreads across counties, and a move from one side of it to the other is a long drive with everything you own riding in a warm box behind you. That is the whole case for the bin that goes in your own car — medications, candles, records, cosmetics, electronics, documents — for the entire drive, not just the first mile. Long drive or short one, there is no mileage charge, no fuel charge and no stair charge on our side; the quote is the price. Austin and Dallas dispatch is (512) 774-3300, 24/7, holidays included.