Where to get free moving boxes

Nine sources cover most needs. Liquor stores, which have the sturdiest small boxes with dividers. Bookshops, for small boxes rated for weight. Grocery stores, for produce boxes. Offices, for paper boxes with lids. Appliance and furniture retailers, for large flat cartons. Buy Nothing groups and Facebook Marketplace. Craigslist free listings. The U-Haul box exchange. And anyone in your building who has moved in recently, since boxes are the first thing a new arrival wants to get rid of.

Take boxes that held something heavy and dense. A liquor store box carried glass bottles and has dividers built in, which makes it the best free box for glasses, jars and small heavy items. A book box from a shop is rated for weight and is the right size for books, which are the heaviest thing per cubic foot in most homes. A paper box from an office has a lid and a consistent size, which makes stacking predictable. Those three are worth going out of your way for.

Avoid anything that held food, anything damp, and anything that has already been used for a move and shows soft corners. Produce boxes often carry moisture and sometimes insects, and a box that held fruit will not survive a week in storage. A box with a crushed corner has lost the structure that carries the weight, and it will fail in a stack. Banana boxes have open handles and no lid, so they are a poor choice for anything you would stack.

Ask on a delivery day, early. Most retailers break down cardboard within hours of unpacking stock, so the window between the delivery arriving and the cardboard going into the baler is short. Call and ask which morning their delivery comes, then arrive that morning. Asking at closing time on a Saturday usually finds the boxes already flattened and gone.

A studio typically needs 15 to 25 boxes, a one-bedroom 25 to 40, a two-bedroom 40 to 60, a three-bedroom 60 to 90, and a four-bedroom 90 to 130. These are BestMovers.info planning estimates rather than measured figures, and they assume a normal amount of books, kitchenware and clothing. Households with a large book collection, a full garage or a hobby that involves equipment run higher, sometimes by half again.

Four things are worth buying rather than scavenging. A wardrobe box, because nothing else lets clothes travel on the hanger. A dish barrel, because its double wall is what protects plates. A mattress bag, because a mattress picks up whatever it is dragged across. And a television box, because a screen needs a rigid fit rather than a large space. Everything else can usually be found free. Each of those four is covered in the packing guides.