A Simple Guide to Labelling Your Moving Boxes to Avoid Confusion

  • 19 November - 8 min read

If you ever need to move to a new home or office, one thing that you might find is an issue is moving items accordingly. It’s so easy to get items mixed up and, before you know it, all the stuff meant for the bedroom will end up in the bathroom!

Should you wish to avoid such a headache when carrying out a big move, then you need to know how to go about labelling up all of your boxes to make the big move a bit easier.

Not sure where to start? Here is some information that will make your whole moving experience a whole lot less stressful. Instead of making your day harder than it needs to be, these simple suggestions will help to keep all of your labels perfectly in sync with what you want in each box.

Why labelling is such a big deal

Of course, if you want to make sure that the moving process goes down without a hitch, we recommend that you spend some time getting used to the importance of labelling in the first place. The last thing that you need during what is already a stressful moving process is finding all of your ornaments got smashed because someone was too heavy handed with them during the move.

Just keep in mind that the boxes might already be bashed or a touch meh, so don’t always expect these boxes to be of elite quality. Even if you can use a handful of them, it’s going to be worth your time. with this simple trick, you make a new member of the community you are about to leave feel nice and welcome, all the while making it easy to source some half decent cardboard boxes with ease.

Trying to rattle though every box, opening them up just to see what is inside, is a time waster of the highest order. Instead of spending all time second guessing what goes where, box labelling saves you a lot of time. While some people see labelling boxes during moving as time consuming, it’s quite the irony.

Why? Because you will spend far more time running around moving boxes without any real knowledge of what is in there. It might take an hour to label all of your boxes, but that is a lot better than the many hours you will send chasing after box after box trying to guess where everything is.

How, then, can you make labelling easier?

Ordering by priority

We recommend that you start off by getting all of your most important items and then labelling them in boxes by priority. This is so useful, and is going to help make it easy for your moving assistants to get the priority right. For example, you could make all of the old boxes that just contain tat and stuff you aren’t really sure about as the low priority boxes. You could make sure that the item with the expensive or fragile equipment is kept in the right kind of condition for moving.

This will help to make sure that you have a simple but effective system for making sure that the removals process is much smother. Try and get things ordered by priority, too, so that you can make sure you aren’t spending all day opening up the stuff that can stay stored in each room.

Colour Co-ordination

Your most useful tool will be to invest in some color coded labels. You can find a good quality set of color coding labels with ease, and this will help you to tell by the label what kind of item it is. For example, yellow labels could be for all of your electronics. Any yellow label boxes should then be marked with a sub-category: games, hardware, connection cables, that kind of thing.

If you want to make the whole place a bit easier to work through, then colour co-ordination allows for more or less everything to go into place without any issue. It’s thanks to this that you can easily make a big difference to your moving of items. Just some good waterproof marker pens, though, as any kind of bad weather might mean that your once-smooth writing becomes all smudged and damaged.

Go by Room

Another useful way to help make every box easier to work through is some color co-ordination room by room. This will make a huge difference, and should allow you to easily organize boxes.

If you are able to, move all of the boxes to the right room by using the colour co-ordination that we mentioned before. You will soon find it much easier to keep the rooms nice and tidy and to avoid any back and forth trips simply by making sure that the room holds all of the right items.

This will help you to ensure that any movers you hire have an easier time of working out what should go where. It might seem like a time consuming exercise, but getting them all labelled by rom can make a lot of difference to the way that you move things around and minimize any mistakes with placement.

You can also find that Gumtree and Craigslist both have some very good freebies sections: on here, you can find a hell of a lot of decent stuff – including boxes.

If you look for people in your area, you should be able to find some people who have boxes that you can take. Again, be realistic about expectations.

While quality does vary (wildly), you can usually get some pretty half decent boxes to move your stuff around within.

Labelling key goods

Lastly, we recommend that you take some time to label up all of your most essential and key goods in the one high priority option. Make sure that you leave clear instructions for anyone that you work with, simply on the basis that you will be labelling the goods to tell removals staff what kind of order to move that in. Stuff like ‘FIRST OFF’ or ‘HANDLE WITH CARE’ makes sense.

Want to make sure that you handle these items and only you? Then simply mark that box as DO NOT TAKE OR TOUCH. You can then move that yourself, taking away any risk with essential, personal or private items. This is useful for things like boxes with private documents and details within, as well as key items of sentimental value that you simply cannot afford to lose track of. Labelling key goods really will make a big difference.

With that in mind, then, you should be able to find a nice selection of free cardboard boxes for moving. If you look around enough and are willing to be a bit more charming with some people than usual, then you should easily be able to get enough boxes to move house without having to spend much money at all.

Now, you should be able to pick up all the removal boxes for free that you need to make the process easier. That big move that sounded so stressful just became a touch easier to plan, right?

Need some help moving in London?

Even with the best labelling, you still need to move all of those items to wherever you are going in London. At Atlas Removals and Handyman Services, we can help you get everything packed up professionally and safely. Want more information? Then contact us today, and we’ll take all of your items away!

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What clients are saying?

Great service and communication with a very competitive price. Andy and his team were very professional and moved our entire house within a few hours with no issues. They took apart and reinstalled 2 ikea wardrobes so quickly and efficiently that you would never tell they were ever moved in the first place. I would highly recommend them.
My wife and I were really impressed with Atlas. Andy and his team were very professional, and the fact so much furniture had to be dismantled then rebuilt in the new house was not a problem for them, I was impressed with the handyman aspect of this removal company as well as the care in packing and moving. I would definitely recommend them !!