Best Packing Services
Salt Lake City, Utah

Packing is the one part of a move where the quality is invisible until weeks later, when you open a box in a different house. Here is what to look for while it is happening.

Just-In-Time Moving packs homes across Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County.

Watch the first box

Nearly everything is visible in one box.

Is the bottom taped properly? Several strips across the seam, before filling. Blown-out bottoms are almost always a taping failure rather than overloading.

Is it filled to the top? No empty space. Gaps get filled with paper or linen so the box is structurally solid and does not crush under whatever is stacked on it.

Are plates on edge? Standing like records, not stacked flat. Stacked plates break under vertical load. This one detail accounts for a large share of all moving breakage and it is immediately visible.

Is each glass wrapped individually? Not nested, not bundled.

Is it labelled on the side? With the destination room. On the side rather than the top, because once stacked the top is the only face you cannot read.

Watch the weight

Pick a finished box up. If it is a two-person lift, it is wrong. Small boxes for heavy things, large for light. A large box of books is slower for everybody and likely to fail.

Watch what goes in together

Contents from one room should stay together rather than being distributed to fill space. A box marked kitchen that contains bathroom items is a box that gets unpacked twice.

Hardware from anything dismantled should go in a labelled bag taped to the item, not into a general box of screws.

The things worth asking for

Tell the crew which items are valuable or sentimental. It changes the wrapping and it is the thing most often left unsaid.

Ask them to leave documents, jewellery, medication and anything irreplaceable for you to carry.

Ask for a numbered box list if you want one. It costs seconds per box and it means you can find things later and know at the far end whether everything arrived.

One thing to check at the end of the day rather than the start: that nothing you need before the move has been sealed into a box. A packing crew's job is to pack, and unless something has been set aside or flagged it will be packed, including the kettle, the phone charger and the clothes you were planning to wear. Walk the house before they leave and confirm that what you deliberately kept out is still out, because retrieving it afterwards means opening boxes that were properly sealed an hour earlier.

Call (435) 862-3080 or email office@movingjustintime.com.