Haha the good old question of mine when my family wanted to move for the first time.
I can tell you what we do now after 5 times switching places in 3 years.
so far we had nothing that it broke through all these moving except some wardrobes and bed misalignment and that's due to time wear and tear (plus these things are designed to be assembled once and that's it. it wasn't designed for multiple reassemblies).
alright enough talk.
firstly we start from 1-2 months ahead from moving schedule. we also look for trustworthy moving companies.
now before you tell me that this is what normal people do, here is a catch, my mom is extremely neat and she doesn't want anyone to touch our stuff. so yeah, no one from the company packs our stuff because of the same reason.
so from 1-2 months from moving schedule, we go out and buy a lot of cardboard boxes. by a lot, I mean around 50 or so (some times we even get more once we run out of them). we also buy masking tape and markers (2-3 markers and 10-15 masking tape).
why markers you say? cause you need to number each of the boxes! the reason being is that we write on a paper what is inside of a specific box (for example box number 13 includes plates, cups, forks, and etc)
so the way we pack is to wrap unnecessary items first and work our way towards essential items at the end (close to moving date)
first, we put down wrapped items that are non-breakable at the button of the box then put semi-breakable items on top. make sure that the weight of the box doesn't go really high. two reasons, one is that there is a chance of box tearing apart and the other is that the labors cannot hold/move heavy boxes so what they usually do is that they drop the boxes at the end when they want to put them down (spoilers! possibility of your items to be broken! and that's bad, we don't want that do we?)
make sure to double or even triple-wrap your really delicate items and put them on top of the box. try to put your delicate items together in a smaller box rather than a big one! and then draw a broken wine glass on the box and mention "Handle With Care My Man!". these boxes need to be held on top of the normal boxes in the truck since the lower boxes need to handle the weight of the top box so they handle a lot of pressure! we all know that delicate stuff cant handle a lot of force, so yea, stack the delicate boxes on top of the other boxes.
Optional: you may want to go along with labors which they are carrying your delicate boxes. (just you know, for making sure that they really HANDLE IT WITH CARE?)
things that you need to pack them a week prior is some of your day to day items. for example, pack some of your plates. if you are family of 4, then pack all of the plates except 4 of them. you can pack those last 4 on the day of your move.
make sure to pack and put all those essential items together in the boxes and don't forget to write down the box number on the box and the items containing within them, on a piece of paper for the love of God. once you are done with everything and you safely shifted to a new place, make sure to tell the labors to put the boxes that are essential in front of other boxes.
then you can start unpacking your stuff. now to make it easier, unpack the boxes that are essential first then work your way to the unnecessary ones. remember I told you to write the items inside the boxes on a piece of paper? now that's handy dandy! some times you need some things that you don't know which box you put them in. if you refer to your paper, you can see what box contains that item and you can check the box number and find that box and open it!
i remember once that we needed a bottle opener (it was a non-essential item for us) so we just referred to the paper and found the box which contained the bottle opener.
a tip, write down the box number on all sides, and on top of the box. some times when the boxes are near each other or on top of each other, you can't tell what number it is if you have only written the box number only on one side.
if I'm not mistaken, the boxes that we use are (WxLxH) 30x40x60 cm for the big one and 30x40x30 cm for the smaller size. just make sure that the boxes have the same Width and Length.
and the length is no more than 1 meter! wanna know another spoiler? cause the bigger it is, the more stuff you put in, silly! it gets heavier! hope by now you know what you get when the box is heavy :)
anyways, I talk too much. or rather, text too much haha. good luck with your packing and unpacking!
have a safe journey.
