Packing the Kitchen: Do It Yourself or Hand It Over?

If you only hand over one room, hand over the kitchen.

That is not a sales line, it is arithmetic. A bedroom is clothing and a bed. A living room is furniture and a shelf of books. A kitchen is several hundred individually breakable objects, most of them awkwardly shaped, spread across cupboards, drawers, a pantry and the tops of things — and it is the last room you can pack, because you need it until the day before.

You can absolutely pack it yourself. Plenty of people do it well. It is worth knowing what you are taking on first.

Why the kitchen is the room that decides

Three properties, all in one room:

• Density of fragile items. Plates, glasses, stemware, ceramics, serving pieces. Nowhere else in a house has this concentration.
• Awkward shapes. Stemmed glasses, handled mugs, lidded pots, a stand mixer with a heavy detachable head. None of them wrap like a book.
• It stays in use. You cannot pack the kitchen three weeks out. It gets packed last, under time pressure, which is precisely the wrong condition for careful work.

Add those together and the kitchen is where a self-packed move most often produces a loss.

What a DIY kitchen pack actually involves

Plan on several evenings, not an evening. An average kitchen packed carefully is a full day's work; spread it over a few sessions and it is a manageable one.

What you need to buy, before you start rather than halfway through:

• Dish-packs — heavy-wall cartons with cell dividers, for plates, glasses and china. The most important item on the list.
• Standard cartons for pantry, appliances and drawer contents.
• Unprinted packing paper. Not newspaper: the ink transfers onto glaze and it is genuinely difficult to remove.
• Bubble wrap, for a second layer on the few items that need one.
• Packing tape — more than you think, and a dispenser.
• A marker. One that writes on cardboard.

Rough shape of the work: plates and bowls take a session, glassware and stemware take longer than everything else combined, small appliances and pantry go quickly, and drawers, utensils and the miscellaneous shelf take a surprising amount of time because nothing in them is standard.

The protocol, item by item

For fragile items:

1. Wrap each piece individually in paper — paper first, always, because it conforms to the shape. Bubble wrap over the top only where it is warranted.
2. Place it in its own cell in the dish-pack. One piece, one cell.
3. Plates on edge, standing vertically, not stacked flat.
4. Fill every gap with crumpled paper until nothing shifts.
5. Pad the top before sealing, and press down to check.
6. Seal, then mark "fragile" and "this side up" on at least two sides.

For everything else:

• Standard cartons, paper between layers.
• Keep boxes liftable. A carton of tinned goods is heavier than it looks; if you cannot pick it up comfortably, neither can anyone else.
• Label by destination room and contents, not by which cupboard it came from.
• Open, opened liquids either travel upright in a sealed bin or do not travel. Oil in a carton of linens is a lesson people learn once.

Where DIY kitchen packs go wrong

Consistently, these five:

1. Ordinary boxes for china. A standard carton has no dividers and thinner walls. It is the single most common cause of a broken dinner service.
2. Plates stacked flat. They survive the packing and fail in the truck.
3. Half-filled boxes. Empty space is movement, and movement is breakage. Fill it with paper.
4. Overloaded boxes. A dish-pack packed to fifty pounds strains its own dividers and hurts whoever lifts it.
5. The last cupboard, at midnight. The final hour of a self-pack is done tired, out of paper and out of patience. That hour produces most of the damage.

Every one of those is avoidable, and every one of them is more likely the later the pack happens.

What a professional pack changes

The protocol is identical. What differs is speed, materials arriving with the crew, and one thing people do not think about until later.

• The materials are there. Right box for right contents, no midnight trip for more paper.
• It is faster. Not because anyone rushes — because the sequence is routine.
• It is documented. Cartons are recorded as they are packed.
• The coverage terms differ for crew-packed items. Under most coverage wording, what is covered and to what extent can differ between an item the crew packed and one that arrived sealed by you. That is standard across the industry — nobody can certify packing they did not do — but it is the paragraph people read after a breakage rather than before. Ask for it in writing while you are still deciding scope.

The middle option most people miss

You do not have to choose the whole house.

Kitchen-only packing is the most common partial scope for a reason. The crew packs everything behind every kitchen door and you handle the bedrooms, the books, the clothing and the garage at your own pace, in your own time, over the fortnight before.

You keep most of the control and most of the saving, and you hand over the one room where the difference between careful and expert is widest. If you want it slightly wider, "kitchen plus fragile" adds the artwork, mirrors, lamps and ceramics from the rest of the house.

See packing services for how the scopes are written, and full-service versus partial packing for where else the line can go.

How to decide in five minutes

Pack it yourself if: your everyday dinnerware is replaceable, you have two free evenings before the last one, and you are willing to buy proper dish-packs rather than reuse supermarket boxes.

Hand it over if: there is a china service, inherited crystal, or a collection in the room; the move is long-distance; the date is tight and your days are not free; or lifting and standing for hours is a problem right now.

Either way, buy the dish-packs. The room is the room regardless of who is doing the wrapping.

Tell us which rooms you would rather not touch and we will scope the pack around exactly those — in writing, before the date is held.