When you are setting out to move cross country the last thing you think about is the condition of the highways or how many bridges you will cross and how many hard breaks you are going to have along the way. Well I have new for you: the roads in America can be bad in certain spots. If your furniture is not well secured your furniture might get damaged or worse broken during the trip. In order to make sure you get your furniture in good condition; you should load your boxes first. Stack the heaviest boxes first. Heaviest boxes include boxes with book, pot and pans. Start by making a wall of boxes at the front of the truck. Toward the top of the boxes are the fragile items. Most of the time you will have 1 foot to a few inches of space left on top. You want to fill that space up so things don’t move around and fall. That’s when you bring in cushions, sheets, pillows to fill in that gap. Then bring in your washer and dryer. Shrink wrap them to make sure its protected and add lighter boxes on top of them. Make your way forward by bringing your mattresses. Your paintings and mirrors will need to be wrapped with movers’ blankets and shrink wrap, but they will need additional protection. That’s when you put them in between the mattresses. This will add additional protection. Don’t forget the sofa. After you protect the sofa with blankets and shrink wrap and depending on how big your sofa is, you want to put the sofa vertically on its side. All along making sure that one furniture is holding the other. Do you have a dining room table? Remove the legs and protect of them with blankets. Take the time to put the screws in a zip lock bag. Tape all of it onto the furniture itself so you don’t lose anything. Lastly bring in your chest of drawers. These are the most symmetrical household goods that most of us have in our homes. If you have other symmetrical furniture load them up next. All your other miscellaneous household goods items like your lawn mower, ladder, bicycles, toys, musical instruments will go last. If after you are finished with the loading of your truck and there is still room, you need to tie the whole thing down with a rope.
Insure yourself a smooth ride
Another reason to load your truck as we stated above is to insure that your moving truck is balanced. If things start to shift around during your 1000 mile drive from say Houston to Colorado you risk of having a very bumpy ride and worse an accident.
Load your household goods properly and get an easy unload
I will never forget the day when I was scheduled to unload a truck from Houston to Main and movers that we hired from U-Haul never showed up. They said they had the dates wrong. Since my flight back was scheduled for the morning, I needed to return the truck, get in an Uber to go to the airport. Everything with very little margin for error. To make matters worse, the client was waiting on me to unload since all their beds and things they needed to function was in the truck. I could not wait another day to unload the truck. So, I was in serious distress. the truck being loading to almost perfection by our team was the only thing I had working for me. When I arrived there at nighttime on this hilly Main village I grudgingly opened the truck gate. I am pretty sure I was cursing the movers under my breath. So, one by one I started to remove the smaller items, convinced that I would still need to come back the next day to finish unloading the larger furniture. After all the smaller items were moved, I looked at the sofa. The loader cocooned it in at least four layers of blankets, and it was shrink wrapped so well that I was able to drag it part of the way without any help and without a scratch to it. By the time the client came back from his dinner he was amazed about how fast I moved the entire shipment alone.
I hope found this helpful. Look for our previous article: “The cheapest way to move yourself cross country without breaking a sweat.”
