Questions on Moving, Packing & Load Order

Load order is the sequence in which items go into a truck or van. A good load order puts heavy, stable boxes in first and near the front, saves lighter or more fragile loads for last, and groups items so the first thing off the truck is the first thing you need. It's a plan, not a guess made box by box.

Packing room by room feels organized while you're doing it, but it tells you nothing about how heavy the resulting boxes are. A "kitchen" box of cast iron and a "kitchen" box of napkins are both labeled the same way, even though only one of them should sit at the bottom of a stack. Weight, not room, is what determines how a box should be handled.

Lift a corner before sealing it. If the box feels heavy relative to how much space is left empty, it's dense and belongs lower in a stack or earlier in the load order. If it's light but full to the top, it's a volume box, not a weight box, and can generally go in later or on top.

A heavy box is simply high in total weight. A dense box is heavy relative to its size — a small box packed tightly with metal tools might weigh more than a large, loosely packed box of pillows. Density matters more than raw weight when deciding where a box goes, because a small dense box is easy to place wrong.

Not necessarily. "Fragile" describes how an item breaks, not how much it weighs or how it should be positioned. A fragile item in a well-padded, sturdy box can sometimes support light weight above it; a loosely packed fragile box generally can't, regardless of where it sits. Read the box, not just the label.

Most homes have one path that's genuinely the fastest and clearest way from a given room to the exit. Mapping it ahead of time — moving furniture out of the way, propping doors — means every trip during loading uses that route automatically, instead of everyone improvising a new path each time.

There's no fixed number — it depends on the household. The idea is to keep it small enough that it's genuinely the first thing you reach for, holding only what you'd actually want within the first few hours in a new place.

There's no single number that applies to everyone — comfortable lifting weight varies by person, technique, and box shape. Many moving guides suggest keeping any single-person box light enough to lift without straining, and splitting dense items like books across multiple smaller boxes rather than one large one.

Packslip is a lightweight planning app built around the same logic as this site — logging box weight class and destination, then suggesting a load order. A spreadsheet can hold the same information, but Packslip is built specifically for that one task, so it's faster to update box by box.

The core manifest and load-order features are designed to work on your device without requiring an account. See our Privacy Policy for the full detail on what's stored and where.

No. Stowage is an independent editorial project. We don't accept sponsorship for our articles, and we don't sell moving supplies. Packslip is our own companion app, not a product from a third-party mover.

Yes, and we'd genuinely like you to. Send it to desk@stowage.shop — corrections get noted on the piece itself, and topic suggestions sometimes turn directly into an entry in the log.

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