Cost Effective Ways to Pack for Your Move
Moving can sometimes be an expensive, and exhausting process. From packing everything up, to wrangling help with the move, to actually moving your items, moving is a big day. Trying to accomplish everything on-time and on-budget can seem impossible. Luckily, there are a few simple things you can do to make your move both efficient and cost-effective.
Pack Items Yourself
The national average for packing services is about $60/hour. That can add up fast if you have a lot of stuff, especially for families. This should be some pretty good motivation to do the packing yourself, or at least try and enlist some friends or family members to help in exchange for food.
Try to start as early as possible if you decide to pack yourself. As soon as you know the date you’re going to move, you should be looking into the logistics of packing everything up and getting ready for that day. Spend a little bit of time every day packing everything up. This can not only help to spread the time requirement over multiple days/weeks, but it can also help prevent injury. With lots of heavy furniture, it can be difficult to attempt to organize it all at once. Be sure to give yourself breaks, and ask for help if you need it!
At Elite Moving & Storage, we use high quality durable boxes and the right packing materials to make sure your items will make it to the destination in the same condition.
Find Creative Ways to Acquire Boxes
While not cripplingly expensive, moving boxes do cost money. For people and families on a strict budget, you may have to look into different ways of finding boxes for moving. Look and see if any friends or family have unused boxes, storage containers, or even suitcases that they’d be willing to lend you. If everything continues to look bleak, there are several different ways that you or your family can still store a lot of items without having to crack into your budget for moving boxes.
Use Alternative Packaging and Cushioning Materials
Looking for creative solutions to packing is something we all go through. We just discussed ways to get box alternatives, but what if you still need more? Well, there are a few ways you can still pack your items while maintaining that budget. The first one is the simplest and most effective, it’s garbage bags. Putting clothes or light objects into garbage bags can serve as a great, compact way of dealing with the box problem. Almost everybody has them, you can buy them in bulk, and you can get tough, quality ones for pretty cheap.
Another alternative is to simply leave some things in their drawers and tape them shut. Look, sometimes you just don’t want to pack everything up. Maybe it’s the junk drawer in the kitchen, or you just have some nicely folded clothes in your wardrobe that you don’t want to get messed up. Leaving certain things in their drawers obviously can not only save time, but also space. Just be sure to tape those drawers up tight so the contents don’t accidentally spill out during the move. It’s also privy to know that leaving them in there will obviously make the items heavier. It’s a trade off.
Use Affordable Moving Companies
Sometimes, though, you just don’t want to do it yourself. If that’s the case, you need to do research into which moving companies may or may not work for you. Elite Moving and Storage is big enough to accommodate your move, but small enough to care. With our competitive prices and personal tough, we’re the perfect moving company for your move in the Chicagoland area. If you’d like to learn more, or get more moving tips, click here.