How to Pack Fragile Things So They Arrive Intact

Very little breaks because something hit it. Most breakage happens because an object moved inside its own carton — a plate slid, a glass rocked, a frame shifted a centimetre at a time over an hour of road — and arrived at the end of that journey against something hard.

Which means the whole method comes down to one idea: nothing inside the box should be able to move. Everything below is a way of achieving that for a particular shape of object.

What to have before you start

Buy the materials before you begin rather than improvising halfway through. Running out mid-kitchen is how a shortcut gets taken.

• Double-walled cartons for anything heavy or breakable. Single-wall boxes are for linen and lampshades. Never reuse a carton that has gone soft or lost its corners.
• Unprinted packing paper. Newsprint works mechanically but transfers ink onto glaze, glass and unglazed ceramic. Buy the blank stuff; you will use more of it than you expect.
• Bubble wrap in two sizes. Large bubbles for volume and cushioning, small bubbles for wrapping detail without hiding it.
• Proper packing tape. Not masking tape, which fails under load, and not duct tape, which leaves residue on everything it touches.
• Cell-divided dish cartons if you have any quantity of stemware. The dividers do the job that a person doing it by hand does inconsistently at eleven at night.
• A marker, and the discipline to use it on more than one face of every box.

Glasses and stemware

Glass fails at the rim and, in stemware, at the join between bowl and stem. Both want support from inside as well as outside.

1. Crumple a small piece of paper and push it into the bowl. This stops the walls flexing inward under pressure.
2. Wrap the whole glass in paper, starting at a corner of the sheet and rolling, then tuck the excess in at the top and bottom.
3. Add a bubble wrap layer for anything thin-walled or long-stemmed.
4. Stand glasses upright in their cells. Upright is the strong orientation; rim-down puts the full load of everything above onto the weakest ring of glass in the object.
5. Fill every gap. If the carton makes any sound when you tilt it, it is not finished.

Plates and bowls

The counterintuitive part: plates travel on edge, not stacked flat.

Wrap each plate individually — one sheet, one plate, edges folded over. Then bundle four or five together and wrap the bundle. Stand the bundles on their edges in the carton like records in a crate, with paper packed down the sides and across the top.

Flat stacks concentrate the whole weight of the stack onto the lowest plate and transmit every road shock straight down through the pile. On edge, the load runs through the strongest axis of the plate and the bundles brace each other.

Bowls nest, but only with paper between each one, and only three or four deep before the stack becomes its own hazard.

Screens, computers and audio equipment

Electronics are less fragile than people assume and far more annoying to replace than they assume.

• The original carton, if you still have it, is better than anything you can assemble, because it was designed around the exact object.
• Photograph the back of every device before unplugging it. Whatever you think you will remember, you will not, at nine o'clock, in a room you do not know yet.
• Label both ends of the cables you disconnect, and bag them with the device they belong to.
• Remove batteries from remotes and anything that will sit for a while.
• Wrap screens in blankets and keep them upright. A panel takes a surprising amount of edge impact and almost no pressure across its face. Nothing goes on top of a screen, ever.
• Carry the drives yourself. Anything holding the only copy of something is not a moving-truck item. It goes in your own vehicle.

Mirrors and framed artwork

Flat, rigid and heavy is an unforgiving combination. The failure mode is a crack that starts at a corner.

Protect the corners first — foam or cardboard corner protectors, which are the single highest-value item in this list for the money. Then wrap in bubble wrap with the bubbles facing outward, so the flat side sits against the glass. Flat picture cartons, sized to the piece, are worth using for anything you would be upset to lose.

Two rules that carry the rest: mark the face and the orientation clearly on the outside, and never lay a framed piece flat. Flat means anything set down on top of it goes straight through the glass. Everything travels on its edge, standing.

An old habit worth naming: taping an X across the glass does not stop it breaking. It only holds the pieces together if it does. That is a genuine benefit for cleanup and for the person carrying it, but it is not protection — do not let it substitute for corners and a proper carton.

Antiques, heirlooms and the things you cannot replace

The practical difference with an irreplaceable item is that no method is good enough on its own, because there is no acceptable failure.

• Document it before it is wrapped. Photographs from several angles, including any existing damage. This is worth doing whether or not anyone ever asks for it.
• Ask about crating. A rigid, purpose-built enclosure is a different category of protection from a carton, and it is the right answer for stone, large glass, and pieces that cannot take any flex.
• Consider the environment, not just the impact. Some finishes, veneers and instruments react to a sudden change in temperature or humidity more than they react to the road.
• Talk to your insurer before the move, not after. Ask what follows your belongings in transit and at what value, and ask specifically how self-packed cartons are treated against crew-packed ones. That distinction catches people out.

Items in this group are the usual reason a partly-handed-over move makes sense: you pack the ordinary rooms at your own pace, and the fragile rooms get packed for you. Anything that needs an enclosure, a crew count or specific equipment belongs with specialty handling rather than in a box you built.

Building the box itself

The wrapping matters less than most people think. The construction of the carton matters more.

1. Tape the base properly. A strip down the seam and a strip across each end — the shape that reinforces the corners rather than just closing the gap.
2. Line the bottom with a few inches of crumpled paper before anything goes in.
3. Heaviest at the bottom, lightest at the top, and never a heavy object resting directly on a light one.
4. Fill every void. The test is simple: lift the closed box and tilt it. Any shifting, any sound, and it needs more paper.
5. Do not overfill. If the flaps do not meet without pressure, the carton is over capacity and the lid becomes the weak point. Split it into two.
6. Label the room, the contents and the orientation, on the top and at least two sides. A crew stacking a truck reads the side of a box, not the top.

When it is worth handing over

There is no prize for packing your own china. The rooms where self-packing goes wrong most often are the kitchen, the display cabinet and the wall — glassware, ceramics and framed pieces — and those are precisely the rooms where a partial arrangement exists.

If you are unsure about a specific item, ask while the scope is being written rather than on the morning. Tell us what it is, what it is made of and whether it comes apart, and we will tell you plainly whether it wants a carton, a crate or your own back seat — in writing, before anything gets wrapped. Start your move brief, or call 778-994-2303 and describe the piece to us.