How to pack a kitchen for a move
Give the kitchen its own day. Not an evening, and not the last few hours before the crew arrives. It is the room that consistently takes two or three times as long as people plan for, and it is also the room where rushing produces the breakages.
Start by throwing things away
Packing a kitchen well begins with packing less of it. Open every cupboard and be ruthless about the things you have not touched since you moved in: the appliance you used twice, the dozen mismatched containers, the spices that expired two addresses ago.
Food is its own decision. Open packets, anything refrigerated and anything frozen are not worth moving across town, let alone across a state. Work down the freezer in the two weeks beforehand rather than facing it the night before, and give away the unopened tins instead of paying to carry them.
Plates go on their edge
This is the one technique that changes the outcome. Stacked flat, plates take the full weight of everything above them on their weakest axis and crack in transit. Standing on edge, like records in a crate, they carry load down through the rim and survive a great deal more.
Wrap each plate individually, stand them upright in a small box, and pack them tightly enough that nothing can shift. Padding above and below matters, but the orientation matters more.
Glasses, bowls and the awkward things
Glasses and stemware go upright, each one wrapped, ideally in a box with cell dividers. Do not nest them inside each other, however tempting, because getting them apart afterwards is where they break.
Bowls can nest, with paper between each one. Anything with a handle or a spout, teapots especially, wants the protruding part padded separately before the whole thing is wrapped, since that is the part that snaps.
Knives get wrapped blade-first in something the blade cannot cut through, taped closed, and labeled as sharp on the outside. Whoever opens that box at the other end may not be you.
- Small boxes for anything heavy, large boxes for anything light. A large box of crockery is a box that will fail or hurt someone
- Paper or bubble wrap between every fragile item, and a padded layer at the bottom and top of the box
- Fill every gap. A half-full box lets contents move, and movement is what breaks things
- Tape the base of every box across the seam as well as along it
- Write FRAGILE on the sides rather than the top, because the top is not visible in a stack
Appliances and the last cupboard
Small appliances travel best in their original boxes if you kept them. If not, remove any glass plate or carafe and wrap it separately, tape the cord to the body, and pad the whole thing rather than trusting the plastic housing.
Leave out one box worth of things you will need immediately: a kettle, a few mugs, a pan, cutlery for the household, a knife, washing-up liquid and a tea towel. Label it clearly and load it last so it comes off first. The alternative is opening six boxes at ten at night looking for a mug.
When to hand it over
There is a point where packing a kitchen yourself stops being worth the days it takes, and it usually arrives with a full set of glassware, a short notice period, or a household that is already at capacity. A packing service exists for exactly that, and it can be scoped to the kitchen alone rather than the whole house.