Find out about 6 ways to pack items that you may not have known about before, making a house move even cheaper and easier with makeshift packing containers.
Are you moving house? Taking some things to your affordable self storage unit? Moving your office supplies to a new place? If you are, there’s no doubt that you’re packing everything up to keep it organised and protected whilst it is in transit and perhaps kept in storage too.
To do this, you can use packing boxes, but they can be expensive to buy, or at the very least challenging to source for free. They can use up precious time, resources and energy when there are some packing container alternatives in your home already, and here are 6 of them for you to consider utilising as you pack up your things:
1. Washing Baskets
Plastic washing baskets, or sturdy woven types, are fantastic containers for packing up items like clothes, towels, sheets, toys and cushions. Because they tend to be round in shape they tend to work best for soft items that can mould to the space.
2. Recycling Bags
Recycling bags are great for transporting towels, clothes, toys and other non-breakable items. They are also super cheap to source, handy to use in daily life after you have unpacked, and as long as they are filled with soft items they can be squished into a car or van easily too.
3. Drawers
It does make sense to empty drawers out before a move in order to declutter. However, that doesn’t mean you have to move the drawers and contents separately. What you can do is use clean tea towels to fill the gap between the items and the top of the drawer, remove anything breakable, and then wrap the furniture in bubble wrap or cling film to keep the drawers shut.
4. Bread Bins
A bread bin is usually quite large, and does not need to remain empty when you move house. Consider filling it with taped cutlery, tea towels, plastic kitchen accessories and other non-breakables that will fit inside, then tape it up for the journey.
5. Towels
Towels can be great ‘containers’ for bathroom toiletries. Rather than put everything in bags, you can place toiletries in the middle of towels and then roll the towels up. The towels can then go into a basket or bag, protecting the toiletries, which if they do leak, the leak will be absorbed by the towels material.
6. Pouffes
A lounge footstool/ pouffe often has a hollow space inside for extra storage. As with the drawers we mentioned above, you can fill a pouffe with all kinds of items and use it to transport them to your new place. Just be sure to be extra careful to avoid packing anything wet or leakable in there because any spillages will be very difficult to fully get out of a piece of furniture such as a pouffe.
Hopefully you’ll save a bit of money on packing materials for your move with the 6 container tips we listed above. As a general rule, if there is a spare space in any item, and you can fill it safely, you should!