Packing & unpacking · interstate moves
Packing is where moving bills drift: materials billed by the roll, hours nobody scoped, “included” boxes that weren’t. Here’s the honest version: the three ways to pack a household, what a real one takes in boxes, and when paying us to pack is the wrong call.
Three ways to pack a household
The market sells packing as an upsell. It’s actually a decision about labor, liability, and time, and the right answer is different for a bookshelf than for a cabinet of glassware. Here are the three honest configurations.
Your hours are free, and labor is the biggest packing cost, so this is the least expensive way through, full stop. Books, clothes, linens, garage shelves: pack them yourself and spend the savings on the miles.
Right for anything you could replace at a store tomorrow.
The crew packs the kitchen, glass, lamps, and art, the rooms where damage claims actually come from, and you handle the rest. The split lands on the written estimate as its own entry, room by room.
One tape roll per six boxes. Each dish pack adds five pounds of paper.
The crew packs the whole house. It costs the most, because it’s the most hours and material, and it earns that cost when the closing timeline is brutal, the house is big, or nobody has a week of evenings to give.
The count, in daylight
Underestimating boxes is how packing runs long and move day starts late. These are the planning counts behind our box estimator: the standard convention, per box type, for a 2-bedroom household.
Planning counts from the standard packing convention, not a bill. The video survey counts your actual rooms. Boxes and materials: priced separately by box/roll unless bundled. Moving blankets and furniture pads ride with the crew. They are not something you buy.
The number
The industry prices packing two ways: hourly labor plus materials, or bundled into the move price. Both are legitimate. What isn’t legitimate is the version where the packing charge first appears at the curb.
This is a planning range, not an estimate. Your exact price is put in writing after a video or in-home survey, as federal law requires. That written estimate is either binding or non-binding.
Scope, plainly
Propane, paint, aerosols, pool chemicals, fuel left in the mower. Federal rules keep them off every interstate trailer, ours included. Plan to use them up, give them away, or dispose of them locally before move week.
Jewelry, cash, passports, medication, the folder of documents you’d need if everything else vanished. Not because a crew can’t pack them, but because they belong in your car, where days in a trailer can’t touch them.
A sealed trailer crossing three states is the end of every houseplant and the start of a very bad smell. Give the plants to a neighbor, eat down the fridge, and let the pantry travel light.
Straight answers
Yes. Labor is the biggest packing cost, and your own hours are free. For books, clothes, and anything you could replace at a store tomorrow, self-packing is the right money call and we'll say so on the survey.
The trade-off is liability, not effort. A box you packed that arrives with the outside intact and the contents broken is usually a denied claim: carrier valuation generally covers owner-packed cartons only when the box itself shows damage. Pack the replaceable, and think twice before boxing the irreplaceable yourself.
Either works. If we pack, materials ride with the job and land on the written estimate. If you pack, buy your own or order through us. Boxes, paper, and tape are priced separately by box and roll unless you book a packing bundle.
Moving blankets and furniture pads are different: they travel with the crew as equipment, not as something you buy.
Yes. That's the à la carte version, and it's the one we'd point most households at. The kitchen, lamps, art, and glass are where damage claims actually come from; the crew packs those rooms, you do the closets and books, and the split shows up as its own entry on the written estimate.
Only if it's on the written estimate. Unpacking is scoped as its own item on the survey call. Say you want it and it gets counted, priced, and written down like everything else. Nothing on our paperwork hides inside a label.
Ready when you are
You’re calling the licensed carrier, not a broker’s sales floor. Weekdays and weekends, out of Oakland Park, FL.
No name, no number, no email. The range shows first. That part you can test yourself in the next sixty seconds.
