PACKING

How to Pack a Kitchen Like a Professional Crew

Dishes vertical, glasses up top, the box sizes that matter, and the one drawer everyone forgets until the truck is loaded.

The kitchen is the slowest room in any home: hundreds of small, fragile, oddly shaped things. Here is the method our crews use, in the order they use it.

The setup

Small heavy-duty boxes (dish packs if you can get them), plenty of packing paper, tape, and a marker. Skip newspaper: ink transfers onto dishes.

The method

  1. Plates travel vertically, like records, each wrapped, with crumpled paper below and above. Flat stacks crack from road vibration.
  2. Glasses and stemware go up top, wrapped individually, never nested bare, in a box marked on every side.
  3. Pots nest with paper between them; lids wrap separately.
  4. Knives get a full paper roll and a labeled bundle, or a blade guard. Crews respect a well-marked knife bundle more than any other box.
  5. The junk drawer: photograph it, dump it into a zip bag, done. It is not worth sorting on packing day.

What not to pack

Opened oils and sauces travel badly. Use up, gift, or release them. And keep the kettle, two mugs, and coffee in the car: future you says thanks.

Prefer to skip all of this? Kitchen-only packing is our most popular partial service.

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