Move-day in India: how a packing crew sets up at a typical household

Most of what we write about Indian moves concerns paperwork, customs, currency and timing — the parts of a move that involve forms and forwarders. But the day a packing crew arrives at a family’s home is, for most clients, the most physically intense and emotionally peculiar day of the whole exercise. People who have never seen a professional household pack are usually surprised by how the day actually unfolds.

This piece is a walkthrough of move-day in an Indian household from the crew’s side. If you are preparing for one, knowing the shape of the day will make it easier on everyone.

The early arrival

The crew shows up at the door earlier than most families expect — typically by 7:30 in the morning for a metro Indian city move, sometimes by 7:00. The reason is heat. Pack-day temperatures in Mumbai or Chennai by 11:00 are physically demanding for a crew on its feet for the next eight hours, and getting the heaviest assembly-disassembly work done in the cool of the early morning is a discipline our crew leads have followed for years.

The standard crew for a three-bedroom Indian household consignment is six to eight people: one crew lead, two specialists (one for carpentry, one for fragile/glass), three to four general packers, and one driver-helper. Everyone wears branded uniforms and identifiable identity cards.

The very first thing the lead does on arrival is a walk-around with whoever in the family is the day’s decision-maker. This is not a formality — it establishes which items go in the consignment, which stay behind, which go to a separate destination, and which are hand-carry-only. Hand-carry items are tagged immediately with a coloured sticker and placed in a designated “do not pack” corner.

The materials and the staging area

The crew unloads packing materials in roughly this sequence: corrugated cartons in three sizes, corrugated sheets and rolls, bubble wrap, kraft paper, packing tape, VCI paper for metals, custom-cut foam sheets, and the specialist tooling for furniture disassembly. For a typical Indian household, the inventory is 80 to 120 cartons, 30 to 50 metres of bubble wrap, three to five plywood crates pre-cut for the largest furniture pieces, and several rolls of stretch wrap. The staging area is usually the largest empty room in the house.

The crew lays a protective floor covering across high-traffic paths. This is not theatre — Indian floors are usually polished granite, marble or vitrified tile, and the cumulative effect of a crew walking back and forth for eight hours can scratch surfaces if the floor is not covered.

The packing sequence: rooms, not categories

There is a long-running debate in the trade about whether to pack by category (all kitchen items, then all clothing) or by room (master bedroom completely, then children’s room). Our protocol is firmly room-by-room.

The reasoning is procedural: a fully-packed room means a sealed-off space the family does not need to re-enter, which reduces the risk of items being moved back and forth, lost, or repacked. By midday, when the family is invariably tired and decision-fatigued, having two or three completely closed rooms is morally restorative.

The typical sequence starts with the room least active in daily life — a study, guest room, or storeroom. Master bedrooms and kitchens are usually mid-day work because they require the most family interaction. Children’s rooms are often last, because children frequently need to retrieve last-minute items.

The kitchen: the longest single room

An Indian kitchen is the most time-consuming room to pack in almost every household, and most families underestimate this. The reasons are familiar: large quantity of small items (spice jars, dabbas, the steel dabba sets that nest into one another), high glass-and-ceramic content, and the kitchen-as-living-space pattern of Indian homes.

Our protocol breaks the kitchen into three stations operating in parallel. Station one handles dry goods, spices and packaged items — small-format cartons with the manifest carefully noted. Station two handles glassware and ceramics — each piece individually wrapped, then placed in cellular dividers within a small carton. Station three handles steel utensils and cookware — the heaviest items, in small cartons to keep weight manageable.

Gas cylinders are returned to the agency — they do not travel.

The puja room: a specific moment

In most Indian households the puja room or puja shelf is its own ceremony in the packing day. Many families want to perform a small ritual before the deities and items are dismantled, and our crews are accustomed to pausing the work for fifteen to twenty minutes for this. The lead will usually offer the family the choice of timing.

Practically, the puja items are wrapped with the same care as fragile glass — individual tissue, individual bubble wrap, individually-cellular cartons. Brass and bronze items get VCI paper. Photographs of gurus or grandparents that hang in the puja room are wrapped in acid-free tissue and packed in flat archival boxes rather than rolled.

The disassembly work

Indian households typically have several items needing disassembly: bed frames, wardrobes with mirrored doors, dining tables, carved swings, and showcase cabinets. Our carpentry specialist runs this work, with each disassembly photographed before and after, each fixing bagged and labelled, and the assembly diagram filled in for the destination crew.

Disassembled components are either flat-packed into crates (for the most valuable carved items) or wrapped in corrugated and bubble wrap and loaded loose. Loose loading is appropriate for sturdy modern furniture; crating is appropriate for anything carved, jointed, antique or sentimentally valuable.

The inventory and the family’s sign-off

Through the day, the crew lead maintains the inventory on a tablet using our digital system. Every carton is numbered, every item described in plain English, and every condition note recorded. A scratched dining table is recorded as scratched, a chipped marble lamp base is recorded as chipped. This protects everyone.

By the end of the day, the family signs off the inventory. This is the document that travels with the consignment and that the destination crew will check against on unpacking day.

The end of the day

A typical three-bedroom Indian household consignment packs out by 5:00 to 6:00 pm, with the truck loaded and despatched to the origin warehouse the same evening or the following morning. The family is left with whatever they have set aside as hand-carry, a copy of the inventory, and a quiet house. That quiet house is, in our experience, one of the most affecting hours of an international move. We always recommend the family takes the evening off before whatever comes next.