Packing and Loading Your Moving Truck

Save time, energy and stress on your move by following the tips on this guide for packing and loading your moving truck!

Why Does it Matter How I Pack The Moving Truck?

There are several reasons why packing the moving correctly will become important:

• Money-  If you pack a moving truck correctly, you might be able to rent a smaller truck than you first imagined.  Since smaller moving trucks often rent out a lower rate, packing the truck correctly can save you money.
• Time- The packing and loading of items is always the process that takes the most time in any move.  If you know how to pack the truck correctly, you won’t be wasting time trying to figure out what goes where, and instead can spend that time efficiently loading furniture and boxes where they need to go.
• Stress-  Spending the entire move worrying whether your items are loaded correctly or if they’re going to fall and break is nerve-wracking and stressful.  Avoid this situation by being confident in the right way to load items.
• Safety-  There are actually two kinds of safety involved in packing and loading a moving truck.  The first kind of safety is that of you and your fellow packers and movers- loading things in an unstable way can lead to falling items and injuries.  Second, and what most people think about, is loading items so that they arrive safely at their destination.

What Are The First Two Things That I Need to Know About Packing a Moving Truck?

The first two things you need to know about packing and loading a moving truck correctly are pretty basic:

• The Plan- You need to have a plan in advance on how you’re going to load the truck.  That’s because you’ll want items to come out of your currently place in a way that will make them easy to load in the proper order.  Don’t try to “wing it” on Moving Day.
• The Truck- You need to have the correct size of truck to be able to hold all your possessions with just a small amount of extra room to be able to maneuver inside the truck.  Having too much room in the truck is a typical mistake- that extra room can cause items to shift and fall during transit.

What Do I Need to Pack a Moving Truck Correctly?

You don’t need a lot of supplies to load the truck correctly.  Having rope, heavy twine, furniture pads (you can usually rent them from the same place you rented the truck), mattress pads, a hand truck, a tape measure, and your plan should cover you.

What Are The First Things You Should Load On The Moving Truck?

Your largest and heaviest items should be secured against the cab wall (that’s the wall the separates the driver from the rest of the truck) should be placed in the truck first, secured by rope.  Use furniture pads between any two items that might be touching.  Secure any lighter items by using heavier items on their opposite sides.

Long items go on next, mostly up on their longest sides or edges.  Loading large-sized mattresses (always use mattress pads to prevent ripping and tearing) go up against the side walls next, secured by rope.  Other long items to secure include sofas, table tops, long pictures and mirrors.

The rest of the furniture should now go on the truck, arranged neatly and orderly, and up against the sides of the truck where possible.  Again, moving pads are your friends here.

Heavy boxes are next on the list, arranged to form rows on the floor of the truck.  Be careful to leave room to walk, and don’t stack the heavy boxes high enough to damage the ones on the bottoms.  Also, never stack heavy boxes on top lighter ones.

Follow those with your lighter boxes, and finally awkward items that didn’t fall into the other categories, secured with heavy twine and moving blankets.

Following this order should make your move more orderly and keep damage and stress to a minimum.

For more great FREE moving tips and articles on movers, relocation, self storage, moving truck rental and more, please visit Movers-Edge.com.  There are plenty of great resources there, including our Change of Address guide, 101 Best Moving Tips and The Ultimate Moving Checklist.

Good luck with your move!



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Tags: loading, moving truck, packing

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