How to Pack Fragile Items for a Move: The Professional Method

The materials that actually matter

• Double-wall cartons for anything fragile — single-wall supermarket boxes collapse under stacking weight, and stacking is exactly what happens in a truck.
• Packing paper as the workhorse, bubble wrap for the highest-risk pieces. Paper is faster, cheaper and cushions better than most people expect when scrunched properly.
• Dish-pack cartons with cell dividers for crockery and glassware. The divider does more protective work than any amount of wrap.
• Stretch film for keeping wrapped bundles together and drawers shut — not as padding, which it is not.
• A thick marker and a labelling rule you actually follow: room, contents, and the word FRAGILE on the top and two sides.

Plates and bowls: vertical, always

Plates travel on their edges, like records in a crate — never stacked flat. A flat stack concentrates the whole pile's weight and every road shock onto the bottom plate; on edge, each plate carries only itself and shock passes through the strongest axis of the ceramic.

Wrap each plate in a sheet of packing paper, bundle three or four together with another sheet, and stand the bundles upright in a dish-pack carton on a thick crumpled-paper base. Fill every gap with scrunched paper until nothing shifts when you rock the box. The test is sound: shake the closed carton gently — if you hear movement, it is not finished.

Glasses and stemware

• One glass per cell in a cell-divided carton. Wrap each glass individually, stuff the bowl of stemware with scrunched paper before wrapping the outside.
• Heaviest glasses in the bottom layer, stemware only ever in the top layer.
• Never pack glasses inside each other, even wrapped — thermal expansion and road vibration lock them together and one of the two loses.
• Fill the carton to the top with paper. A half-full fragile box is a broken fragile box.

TVs and electronics

The original box with its fitted foam is genuinely the best packaging a TV will ever have — if you kept it, use it. If not, the professional method is a flat-screen carton with foam corner protectors, the screen wrapped in a soft blanket first and bubble wrap second, so nothing abrasive touches the panel.

Two rules matter in transit: a flat-screen TV travels upright, never laid flat — the panel is not built to carry its own weight horizontally over bumps — and it gets photographed, cabling and all, before disconnection. The photo saves an hour of guesswork at the other end.

Mirrors, glass tops and artwork

Tape a large X across the face of any mirror or glass top with painter's tape. It will not stop a break, but it dampens vibration and holds fragments together if the worst happens, protecting everything packed around it.

Corner protectors, a full bubble-wrap layer, then a picture carton or a custom crate for anything large, heavy or valuable. These pieces travel standing on edge, slotted between mattresses or sofa cushions in the truck — never flat under other cargo. For marble, canvas art above sentimental value, and anything you could not replace, measured wooden crating is what professionals use, and it is the one packing job we would always hand to a crew rather than do at home.

The five mistakes behind most breakage

• Empty space in the carton — contents accelerate into the gap on every stop and turn.
• Flat-stacked plates concentrating the load on the bottom of the pile.
• Heavy items packed above fragile ones in the same carton.
• Oversized cartons for fragile items: a big box of crockery is too heavy to carry safely and flexes under stacking.
• No labelling — the carton of glassware that nobody knows is glassware ends up at the bottom of a stack.