Packing & Unpacking

Packing is where most Indian moves go wrong. A family rushes the packing themselves, uses inadequate boxes or wrapping, and then wonders why the glassware arrived broken after two days on the road from Mumbai to Delhi. The distance alone means packing standards that might be acceptable for a short city shift are simply not enough for an intercity relocation. Seemleius packing and unpacking brings professional materials and a methodical crew to that job, available as a standalone service or as part of a full domestic move.

It sits within our domestic relocation service and can be added to any move.

Why packing matters more over Indian road distances

An intercity move in India can involve twenty or thirty hours of road transit across varied terrain and road conditions. Items that seem adequately packed for a short drive will shift, compress and sustain damage over that distance. We pack to the standard the journey requires — double-walled boxes for heavy items, proper cushioning for fragile goods, stretch-wrap for furniture surfaces, and custom-built crating where high-value pieces demand it.

How packing and unpacking works

1. Scope the job. A full home, selected rooms, or just the fragile and high-value items — we design the packing scope around what you actually need.
2. Pack methodically. The crew works room by room with the right materials for each type of item, labelling every carton as they go.
3. Move or store. Packed items travel with your relocation or into storage — fully protected and inventoried.
4. Unpack and set up. At your new home or office, we unpack, place items where they belong and clear away all materials so you can start living in the space.

Packing for India’s climate, not just the road

India’s climate adds a layer of packing consideration that does not apply everywhere. Monsoon-season moves face humidity and the possibility of rain during loading; summer moves involve high temperatures that can affect electronics and certain fabrics. Our crew accounts for the season and the route when choosing materials and wrapping methods.

Whether you want your whole home packed, just the fragile items, or a full unpack at the destination, we scope it to fit. Ask about packing and we will tailor the service to your move.

Packing materials are graded — and the grade matters

“We use good boxes” is not a specification. Corrugated board comes in plies, and the ply count decides what a carton can carry over a thousand kilometres of Indian highway. Three-ply suits linen and clothing; five-ply is the workhorse for books, kitchenware and general contents; seven-ply and double-walled board carry the dense, awkward loads. Around the cartons sits a family of purpose-built materials, each doing one job well.

Newspaper deserves a special mention because so many self-packed moves rely on it: the ink transfers. Unwrapping a wedding dinner set to find yesterday’s headlines printed on every plate is a small tragedy we see often enough to warn against — unprinted packing paper costs little and exists for exactly this reason.

How a packing day actually goes

A professional crew does not drift through the house filling boxes. The day has an order. Fragile and high-value items are packed first, while the crew is freshest — the crockery cabinet, the showcase, the electronics. Then the kitchen, which is always the longest single room; an ordinary Indian kitchen produces more cartons than any bedroom. Wardrobes follow, then books, then the soft goods that cushion the load plan. Furniture is dismantled last, so the family has somewhere to sit until the afternoon. Beds are the final items packed, and at the destination the same logic runs in reverse: beds first, so whatever else happens, everyone sleeps properly on night one.

A 2BHK typically packs in a day; a full 3BHK takes a day and a half to two days with a proper fragile count. If someone promises to pack a large family home in four hours, the promise tells you how carefully the work will be done.

Keep these with you, not in the truck

Some things do not belong in any carton, however well wrapped. Original documents — property papers, passports, degree certificates, insurance policies — travel with you. So do jewellery, cash and small heirlooms; no reputable mover carries them, and our crews are instructed to hand anything of that nature straight back. Medicines join the personal bag because a truck delayed by a landslide on a ghat road should never mean a missed dose. LPG cylinders cannot be transported with household goods at all — surrender the cylinder against the subscription voucher and take a fresh connection at the destination. Inverter and vehicle batteries move only after a technician confirms they are sealed and safe; a leaking battery in a closed truck body puts everything else in the load at risk.

Electronics get a method of their own

Televisions, computers, sound systems and kitchen appliances fail differently from crockery — not with a crack you can see, but with a fault that appears at first switch-on. The method that prevents it is specific. Original cartons with their moulded foam are the gold standard, which is why the surveyor will ask whether you kept the TV box; where it is gone, a flat-screen travels edge-on in a padded television carton, never laid flat under other load. Cables come off, get coiled and labelled, and travel in a bag taped to their own device. Refrigerators ride upright — a fridge transported on its side needs hours standing at the destination before the compressor can be safely started, and the crew will tell you so rather than plug it in to be helpful. Front-load washing machines get their transit bolts refitted so the drum cannot destroy its own suspension on a bad stretch of highway. Desktop computers are backed up before packing day; that one is on you, and it is the cheapest insurance in the whole move.

In monsoon season each electronics carton also gets a moisture barrier — sealed film and desiccant — because humidity inside a truck body on a coastal route is as real a hazard as any pothole.

Unpacking, and the case for a short stay in storage

Unpacking is where the service earns its second half. The crew opens cartons room by room, places contents where you direct, reassembles the furniture that was dismantled, and leaves with the debris — the flattened cartons, the used wrap, the tape offcuts. You are left with a home, not a cardboard warehouse. Damage, if any, is noted against the inventory on the spot rather than discovered a fortnight later.

Sometimes the two ends of a move refuse to line up: the new flat’s registration is a week away, the painters need three more days, the possession letter is late. Packed goods can go into clean, inventoried warehouse storage for days or weeks and be delivered when the home is genuinely ready. Families who have tried living amid two hundred sealed cartons while a house is painted tend to call the storage week the best money of the entire move.

The items no grade chart covers

Every home holds a few things that sit outside any materials table, and they are usually the things the family cares about most. A harmonium or a veena travels in a fitted case inside a cushioned carton, tuned down slightly so string tension does not fight the journey. Paintings and framed photographs get glass taped in a cross pattern, corner guards, and a flat crate if the piece is large — never a stack of frames face to face in a carton. Pooja idols and brass lamps are wrapped individually in cloth before paper, partly for protection and partly because that is how they ought to be handled; the crew asks before touching a home’s mandir, and packs it last so it is the first thing set up in the new house if the family wishes. Marble and granite — a tabletop, a chakla, a grinding stone — ride on edge in timber, since stone that travels flat finds every pothole. None of this appears on a standard rate card, which is exactly why the surveyor walks every room and asks what matters rather than assuming the carton count tells the whole story.

Packing for storage is its own discipline

Goods heading into a warehouse for a month are packed differently from goods riding straight to a new flat, and conflating the two is a common self-packing mistake. Storage packing assumes time: fabrics go in with desiccant against ambient humidity, wooden furniture is wrapped breathable rather than sealed in film that traps moisture against polish, mattresses stand in ventilated covers, and nothing organic — food, spices, plants — enters a carton at all, because a single forgotten packet of atta can introduce weevils to an entire storage lot. The inventory also works harder: every carton is numbered against a manifest so a single box — the winter clothes, the pressure cooker — can be retrieved from the stack without excavating the lot. If there is any chance your move will pause in storage, say so at the survey; the crew packs for the longer journey from the start.

How a packing quote is put together

Packing is priced on three quantities, and none of them is the number of rooms. The first is material: the carton count by grade, the metres of bubble wrap and film, the wardrobe boxes and any timber crating, all estimated from the survey walk — a home with a crockery cabinet, a large mirror and a marble table needs a different material list from one that is mostly clothes and soft furnishings. The second is crew time: how many packers for how many hours, which depends on the fragile share more than on the volume. A kitchen full of glass and brass is slow, careful work; a bedroom of folded clothes is quick. The third is the scope you have chosen — full pack, fragile-only, packing without transport, unpacking without packing, or the whole service end to end — because each draws on a different mix of people and materials.

Two things move the figure that families do not always expect. Access affects packing as well as loading: in a walk-up flat the packed cartons are carried down by hand, and the crew is sized for that carry. And the season changes the material list — monsoon packing adds film and desiccant to anything that minds moisture, and that costs a little more. What does not move the figure is haggling the carton count down after the survey; the count is what it is, and a packer who agrees to fewer boxes is planning to overfill them. A written packing quote should show material, crew and scope as separate lines. If it arrives as one number with no survey behind it, ask how the number was reached.

Questions we hear every week

Can I pack some things myself and leave the rest to you?

Certainly — many families pack their own clothes and books and hand over the kitchen, the fragiles and the furniture. Be aware of one honest trade-off: cartons you pack yourself are covered differently under transit insurance, because nobody can certify what is inside or how it was cushioned. Pack the replaceable things yourself; let the crew take the irreplaceable ones.

Do the materials get reused?

Cartons in good condition get a second life, and we take the used material back after unpacking rather than leaving it to a scrap dealer’s bonfire. What we will not do is pack your glassware in a carton that has already softened from a monsoon trip — board loses its crush strength when it has been wet, and a soft box is a false economy.

Is packing available on its own, without transport?

Yes. Some customers arrange their own vehicle, or need a house packed for renovation storage, or want only the fragile items professionally boxed before a self-managed local shift. We scope the packing alone and hand over labelled, inventoried cartons ready for whatever comes next.

How many cartons does an average home produce?

As a rough planning figure, a lived-in 2BHK runs to sixty or eighty cartons and a 3BHK past a hundred — the kitchen alone often accounts for a quarter of them. The number surprises almost everyone at the survey, which is rather the point of doing one: the carton count drives the material order, the crew size and the vehicle, and guessing it from a phone call is how moves end up with a half-packed house at sunset.