Top Five Moving Box or Container Options

When packing up your home or office for an upcoming move, you must decide on what kind of moving boxes to use for your personal belongings.

Here is a list of the kinds of boxes, cartons, containers, or whatever you call them to use for your upcoming moving project.

Top 5 Options:

1. Traditional Cardboard Boxes

Purchase moving boxes from your mover, local home goods store or from an online vendor.

These moving boxes are made specifically for moving, but they may vary in quality and cost. Naturally, you’ll want the cheapest boxes; but cheap boxes could be low quality and could damage easily.

Home Depot offers a ton of options for your packing supply needs. But before you go out and spend all kinds of money on equipment you may (or may not) need, I suggest an in-home estimate from a professional to figure out what kind of moving boxes you need and how many you need.

Pro Tip: Ask your mover if they have any used moving boxes for free.

2. Plastic Moving Bins

These are a great, environmentally friendly option; the best alternative to traditional moving boxes.

They can be rented from your moving company of choice. Flatbush Moving rents moving bins by the day, by the week or by the month. All dependent upon what you need.

You can even buy them from mover supply companies, like  U Line “Round Trip” Totes

But before you do anything, I suggest an in-home estimate from a professional to figure out the number of bins your move will require.

3. Plastic Tote Containers

Plastic Tote Containers are great reusable options. These are more expensive, but once they are used for the move, you can keep them for your own home storage needs.

If you don’t have a lot of space in your new apartment or home, this might not be the best option.

You can buy them from Home Depot Plastic Storage Containers; but, as you can see they can be quite expensive.

4. Used Boxes

You can get these basically anywhere. As Jerry Seinfeld said in one of his interludes on Seinfeld, moving makes a person obsess about boxes. Going up and down the block and in and out of stores asking for boxes.

You can do that, or simply go to your local grocery store, local liquor and wine store and ask if they have any boxes they are getting rid of.

Even if you have an Amazon addiction, you can re-use those boxes for packing. Most of these boxes, however, are very small and will not fit much. Instead of having 40 regular sized boxes you could find yourself with 100 of these smaller boxes, making the moving process more difficult and time consuming.

Or you can just ask your mover if they have any?

5. Garbage Bags

You should almost never use garbage bags for moving purposes.

The main reason being that these bags can be confused for ACTUAL garbage at some point and that could lead to the loss of important contents.

It seems easier to throw clothing, towels, sheets and other linens into a garbage bag for a quick and easy transport; but the time you save “packing” these items in garbage bags, you’ll spend re-folding or re-washing.

One good thing about them, they are kind of cheap. Check out some Garbage Bags on Amazon.

There are so many options when choosing the kind of container to pack belongings in.

Check with your mover about their used box inventory, they might have some they can give you for free.

Also, if your move is a big move, most movers will give you bundles of free boxes in advance. This will give you the best equipment, the same equipment that the professionals use.

Check out Flatbush Moving’s Box Store Catalog to see what options you have when purchasing boxes. We are not a big online store, but if you’d like to buy any equipment, simply give us a call at our warehouse, 908-925-8500 or come on by to learn more.