Dish boxes for cross country move

[kermit116]

I'm helping my cousin pack for her cross-country move. She's having trouble finding inexpensive dish boxes. She has a few sets of old family china and glassware, so she'll need lots of dish boxes to pack these items.

I've found other moving boxes at Costco, but I can't find any good dish boxes - does anyone have ideas? There's a local storage facility that sells them, but the mark up seems pretty high.

I'm thinking she'll just have to pay for the more expensive dish boxes for the sake of protecting the family china, but I just wanted to help her out and see if you all have any tips for finding cheaper dish boxes.

I'm looking for the boxes that divide dishes individually and have the little foam wrappers for each dish and glass.

 

[pansmermaidzlagoon]

do you have a U-Haul near you? We got ours from them. They were affordable and worked very well.

http://www.uhaul.com/MovingSupplies/Boxes/

these are kits, but if you click on the kit, you get an idea of the individual price

 

[Cheshire Figment]

Try www.uline.com which sells boxes nationwide. Before my last major move I used them. Their boxes and packing materials, even including delivery charges, were much lower than any local store, whether a storage place or Office Supply store.

 

[neatokimmo]

Have you priced out rolls of foam? For the glasses, liquor boxes often have inserts. They are made to hold hundreds of pounds of glass and liquid, I daresay they are more sturdy than a new regular box. You could just wrap the pieces in foam, pack with newspaper then seal it up. I have moved glasses this way for years (using recycled bubble wrap & newspapers).

 

[kermit116]

Thanks for all the great tips!

 

[HeatherFeather]

Also check craigslist for anyone who recently moved TO the area that may want to get rid of boxes. We did that when we moved 14,000 lbs from SC to here in FL. The guy who picked them up was thrilled to get them and we were thrilled to get rid of them.

 

[MineMail]

Craigslist is good, as is freecycle if your area has one.

I don't like using foam plates because they're not always environmentally-friendly, but this is one case where they're really useful. Put a foam plate in between each plate or bowl to cushion and protect. I also used foam sheeting and didn't break a single dish through two moves. (We rented for a year and didn't unpack, so the boxes were in the garage for over a year.)

I didn't reuse the foam plates for food, but I used them up for small projects that involved glue or paint. I think some of them went into a costume, too, but I don't remember what the character was now.

My BIL's best tip was to make sure to put packing foam/wrap/paper all around the dishes inside the box so that they can't move. That's what breaks them - being shuffled around and shifting inside the box. We didn't let the movers take the china, we moved that ourselves with a trailer, but when we opened the boxes, everything was where we had packed it, with the packing stuff holding it in the middle of the box.

This is a good site for moving tips:
http://flylady.net/pages/Flying_MovingTips.asp

 

[angwill]

I went with Uhaul dish and glass boxes. It was worth the cost to protect dishes that would cost a lot more than the boxes to replace if broken.

 

[SandrA9810]

My aunt packed a lot of china when the house sold. My great grandmother's china survived two moves, one out to Texas where it sat for about 5 years before my aunt brought it back to me in Florida. It's not sitting in a storage unit down there.

Bubble wrap between each piece, and then bundles of 5 wrapped with bubble wrap. Making everything fit snug into a box. Don't pack big boxes, china gets very very heavy.

The boxes a ream of paper come in are very handy. Very strong, very small, with handles. Liquor boxes also do a very good job. Most liquor stores will give them away for free.


As for bubble wrap, we go through a ton of it, Walmart still has the best price of $15 for 200 sq ft. Most often, even in bulk, it's sold for a $1 a sq ft.
The Container Store has the best prices on packing peanuts. We get 12 cu ft for $20, on ebay it's 8 cu ft for $16 shipped. They also have a huge variety of boxes, but I find them a bit high in price.

You'll go through lots of bubble wrap, lots of tape, and create one huge mess during the unpacking process. I recently helped my aunt unpack some more of my grandmother's china and glasswares that have been sitting untouched since 2003. Nothing was broken out of all of it. By the end of it, we filled two large moving boxes of packing materials. I saved it and shipped (any size package under 13 oz is first class, so it was $3, packing peanuts are light) or brought back a lot of it with me to California (a lot of the foam and bubble wrap). It all got reused for shipping items.

 

[Maddle]

My two cents -

The box needs to be VERY strong so it will not crush. (That's why dish packs are so pricey.)

The contents must be packed tightly so it won't shift inside the box. The box must be filled from top to bottom - use filler paper - but don't over stuff. You don't want the top bulging, because then it will get pushed down and stress the dishes.

The dishes must be packed on their sides/upright. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it will help them resist cracking. It distributes the stress around the edges, and not into the center of the dish.

The glassware/stemware must have the rims and stems protected, and packed vertical.

Good luck.

Maddle

PS - I always used new packing paper, and lots of it. Lots and lots.