A move is mostly a logistics problem dressed up as an emotional one. The day itself goes a lot smoother when you've gathered the right supplies in advance instead of throwing things into bin bags at midnight. But it's also easy to overspend — fancy moving kits and a wall of identical boxes look reassuring and quietly drain your budget right when money is tight. The goal here is the middle path: get what genuinely saves you time, sweat and broken plates, and don't pay for the rest.
This is a checklist and a buying guide in one. We'll walk through what to gather and why, then move into the packing tips that actually make the difference, and finish with the renter-specific things — protecting your deposit at both ends — that most generic moving lists skip entirely.
📦Boxes: the right sizes matter more than the count
People buy boxes by quantity when they should think in sizes. A pile of one-size-fits-all boxes leads to back strain and crushed contents. A small mix of the right shapes does the real work.
- Small boxes are for heavy, dense things — books, tinned food, tools, records. The temptation is to fill a big box with books; resist it, because you'll never lift it and the bottom will give out.
- Medium boxes are the everyday workhorse: kitchen items, toys, mixed household clutter, the bulk of an average home.
- Large boxes are for light but bulky things — bedding, pillows, cushions, lampshades, winter coats. Heavy items in a large box become impossible to carry, so keep these for the fluffy stuff.
- Wardrobe boxes have a hanging rail so clothes go straight from the closet to the box still on their hangers. They cost more, but for a big wardrobe they save hours of folding and re-ironing.
- Specialty boxes exist for awkward items — dish-pack boxes with cell dividers for glasses and stemware, flat picture-and-mirror boxes, TV boxes. Worth it if you own the things they protect.
If you'd rather not buy new, used boxes from a friend who moved recently, a local shop, or a buy-nothing group work fine for non-fragile loads. Just check they're clean, dry and still structurally sound — a soft, previously-soaked box will betray you halfway down the stairs.
🧵Tape, and why a dispenser is worth it
Buy more packing tape than you think you need; running out mid-pack is a special kind of frustration. Get proper wide packing tape, not office sticky tape, and get a tape gun or dispenser. A dispenser sounds like a nice-to-have until you're sealing your fortieth box, at which point it becomes the hero of the day — it's faster, it cuts cleanly, and it spares your fingernails. Reinforce the bottom seam of every box with an extra strip; that seam is where heavy contents punch through.
🫧Protecting fragile things
For anything breakable you'll want bubble wrap and packing paper. Bubble wrap cushions glass, ceramics and electronics; packing paper (plain newsprint, not printed newspaper, which transfers ink) is for wrapping and for filling the gaps so nothing shifts in transit. A box that rattles is a box that breaks.
You can stretch your budget by using what you already own as padding: towels, blankets, jumpers and socks all make excellent free wrapping. Wrap glasses in a tea towel, stuff a sock inside a mug, line a box with a duvet. It's slower to unpack but it costs nothing and it works.
🏷️Markers, labels and a colour system
Labelling is the cheapest upgrade to your whole move. Grab a couple of thick markers and either printed labels or coloured tape, and assign each room a colour or a code. Mark every box with the room it belongs in and a one-line note of what's inside. The payoff comes at the other end, when movers (or tired friends) can drop boxes in the right room without asking, and you can find the kettle without opening nine boxes.
🛋️Wrapping furniture and big items
Furniture takes the most damage in a move, and damaged walls and floors are exactly what eats into a deposit.
- Stretch wrap (shrink wrap) is the cling-film-on-a-roll that holds drawers and cabinet doors shut so they don't swing open on the stairs, and keeps upholstery clean. It's also handy for bundling cables, brooms and anything loose.
- Furniture pads or moving blankets wrap around tables, dressers and the corners of anything with edges, stopping dings and scratches. If you're hiring a van you can often rent these; otherwise old blankets do.
- A mattress bag is a cheap plastic sleeve that keeps your mattress clean and dry. Mattresses pick up road grime and damp astonishingly fast, and you sleep on the thing — well worth a few dollars.
💪Lifting gear and the small stuff
You don't have to carry everything on your back. Moving straps (often called lifting or shoulder straps) shift weight off your arms and let two people carry awkward loads more safely. A hand truck or dolly turns a back-breaking fridge or stack of boxes into something you wheel across the floor — if you're not hiring movers who bring one, borrowing or renting a dolly for the day is money well spent.
Then there's the easily-forgotten small stuff that quietly saves the day:
- Resealable bags for screws, bolts and brackets when you take furniture apart — tape the bag to the underside of the piece it came from so it can't get lost.
- A box cutter and a pair of scissors, kept somewhere you can actually find them rather than buried in a sealed box.
- A basic tool kit — usually just a screwdriver and an Allen key — for dismantling and rebuilding flat-pack furniture and bed frames.
✅Packing tips that actually help
Supplies are half the battle; how you use them is the rest. A few habits separate a calm move from a chaotic one:
- Pack room by room. Finish one room before starting the next. It keeps like with like, makes labelling honest, and gives you a visible sense of progress instead of a half-emptied whole flat.
- Heavy things in small boxes, light things in big ones. It's the rule everyone forgets at 11pm. Follow it and your boxes stay liftable and your backs stay intact.
- Label the side, not the top. Once boxes are stacked, you can't read the tops. Writing on two sides means you can identify a box in a pile without unstacking it.
- Photograph the back of your TV, router and any wired setup before you unplug anything. A quick phone photo of which cable goes where saves a baffled hour at the new place.
- Pack an "open-me-first" box. One clearly marked box (or a bag) with the things you'll need the first night before you've unpacked anything: toiletries, phone chargers, a snack and some water, a set of bedding, a couple of basic tools, loo roll, and any medication. It's the difference between collapsing into a made bed and rummaging through twenty boxes at midnight.
🏠The renter's deposit checklist
This is the part generic moving guides leave out, and it's the part that decides whether you get your money back.
Before you hand the keys back, photograph the old place once it's completely empty — every room, the floors, the walls, the oven and any pre-existing marks — ideally with a timestamp. Clean it to the standard your lease asks for. Those photos are your evidence if a landlord later claims damage that was already there or never happened.
Do the mirror image at the new place: photograph its condition before you carry a single thing in, while the rooms are still empty. Note any existing scuffs, stains or marks and, where you can, flag them to your landlord or agent in writing. You don't want to be charged on the way out for damage that was waiting for you on the way in.
While you're actually moving furniture, protect the floors and door frames in both places. Lay down cardboard or an old rug on hard floors, go slowly through doorways, and use those furniture pads on corners. A gouged floor or a chunk taken out of a frame is one of the most common deposit deductions, and it's almost always avoidable with a bit of care.
🧭The short version
Get a sensible mix of box sizes — small for heavy, large for light — plenty of tape with a dispenser, bubble wrap and paper for the fragile bits, markers and a colour code, and stretch wrap, pads and a mattress bag to keep furniture safe. Borrow a dolly for the heavy lifting, keep a "first-night" box aside, and use towels and blankets as free padding. Then do the renter's bit: photograph both places empty, protect floors and frames as you carry, and pass your boxes on afterwards. Get those right and the move costs less, breaks less, and gives the landlord nothing to argue about when your deposit is on the line.