How to pack a mirror for moving

Painter's tape corner to corner across the face, then a second pass in the other direction so the surface is crossed twice. It does not stop a break; it holds a broken sheet together so it does not come apart in your hands or shred the backing. Then a sheet of stiff card cut to the size of the glass goes over the tape on both front and back.

A mirror carton, which comes as two or four flat pieces that telescope to the size of the piece and close into a rigid flat box. It is the one packing material with no good improvised substitute at large sizes, because a rigid perimeter is exactly what a mirror needs. Foam corner blocks go on before the box closes, since the corners take almost every impact.

On its edge, upright, with one person at each end and the load taken by the frame rather than the glass. Set it down on a carpet offcut or a blanket rather than a hard floor, because putting a heavy mirror down onto tile chips the bottom edge and a chipped edge propagates a crack later. In the truck it stands upright against a flat surface, strapped, with nothing leaning on it.

Take it off. A dresser mirror is attached with two brackets and comes away in minutes, and it is packed separately as a mirror. Left attached, it acts as a long lever on a piece that is being tilted through doorways, and the failure is usually at the bracket rather than in the glass. Bag the bracket screws and tape them to the back of the dresser.

Upright and slightly leaning against a wall, resting on a batten rather than on bare concrete, in a space that does not swing between damp and dry. Moisture reaching the back of an older mirror lifts the silvering and produces the black speckling around the edges that cannot be reversed. Flat storage is worse still, because anything stacked on top loads the centre of the pane.

A mirror leaned against a wall unprotected during the loading, which is where most of them break, and one-person carries of pieces that need two. Box it before the crew arrives rather than after. The other failure is bubble wrap alone over bare glass, which feels protective and is not: without a rigid face, any point pressure goes straight into the pane.