How many boxes you actually need, room by room

As a rule of thumb, plan on ten to fifteen boxes for each room that has things in it, and closer to twenty for a full kitchen or a room lined with books. Count storage spaces as rooms. Buy a mix of sizes, mostly small and medium, and get about a fifth more than the estimate, because nobody finishes packing with boxes to spare.

Count the rooms with things in them, not the rooms on the floor plan

The estimate goes wrong before anyone picks up a box, at the point where somebody says two bedrooms and means two bedrooms. The attic, the basement, the garage and the closet under the stairs are rooms for this purpose, and in an older house they are often the fullest ones.

That matters more here than in newer markets. A two-family in Pine Hills or a row house in Troy has less closet space than a suburban build, and the overflow has been going up into the attic for as long as the family has lived there. We open attics every week that hold more than the floor below them.

The room-by-room ranges

These are the numbers we plan against, and they are ranges rather than a formula because a kitchen belongs to a person who cooks or to a person who does not.

• Kitchen: fifteen to twenty-five boxes, including four or five dish packs. It is the slowest room in every house.
• Living room: eight to fifteen, more if there are books or a media cabinet. The furniture does not count; it goes in blankets, not boxes.
• Each bedroom: eight to fifteen, plus a wardrobe box or two for whatever hangs.
• Home office: ten to twenty, almost all of them small, because paper and books are heavy.
• Bathroom: three to five. Small ones. Half of what is in there will be thrown away rather than packed.
• Garage, basement, attic: unknowable until someone looks, which is why we ask to see them.

Add those up for a real three-bedroom house with a full kitchen and a basement and you are usually somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty boxes. People hear that number and do not believe it, and then they run out.

Sizes matter more than the count

The mistake is buying large boxes because they seem efficient. A large box full of books cannot be lifted by anyone and it will fail at the bottom on the stairs. Heavy things go in small boxes. Light, bulky things go in large ones.

• Small: books, dishes, canned food, files, tools. Most of your boxes should be this size.
• Medium: pots, small appliances, toys, shoes, the general contents of a room.
• Large: bedding, pillows, lampshades, coats, the things that weigh nothing and take up space.
• Dish packs: double-walled, for the kitchen and anything else that shatters.
• Wardrobe boxes: hanging clothes go in on the hanger and come out on the hanger, which is the one packing job that takes no time at all.

The last-week correction

Whatever number you land on, add a fifth. The last week of packing is when the drawers get opened, and drawers hold more than they look like they hold. Buying the extra boxes in advance costs less than the panic run to the hardware store on the night before, and it means the extras match the ones you already have.

Used boxes are fine for most things and free boxes are fine for some. A liquor store box is built for weight and suits books well. A grocery produce box is not, and it may bring passengers with it. If a box has been wet, it is not a box anymore.

When it is faster to have someone else do it

The honest arithmetic is that a full house is somewhere over a hundred boxes and a working adult packs maybe ten in an evening. For a lot of people that math does not close before the date, and the fix is not more boxes. Packing is a service we sell on its own, for the whole house or for the kitchen only, and we bring the materials with us. The kitchen alone is the version most people choose, because it is the room that eats the weekend.

Packing services in AlbanyHow to pack a kitchenGet a free quote

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