How to Get Your Glass and China Across the Country Intact

Let’s face it.  We all move and none of us wants to have our favorite glass and china break when we do it.

Last week Dave and I moved to a different city and we moved all our personal crystal, three sets of china and all my glass inventory for my store.  One piece, a small stem I got from my grandmother, broke.  It’s one of about a dozen undistinguished small cut stems that I like only because it came from her.  So I wasn’t too sad.

Three years ago I got my Mom’s Apple dishes and had the movers wrap and move them.  This time I used the same technique they did to get our dishes safely and wrapped and moved them ourselves.

Here’s how.

Dave bought 25 pounds of white paper from the moving company.  I took 4 sheets of this, put a plate on top, folded a corner of the top sheet over the plate, added a second plate, folded the second sheet over, then the same for the third and fourth sheets.  Then folded the paper over well around all four of the plates.

This method is great for plates, pie plates, Pyrex casseroles, bowls, lids, basically anything you can stack.  Just be sure to keep at least one layer of paper between each piece and wrap the paper around all the pieces in the group.

I used medium sized boxes with wadded up newspaper in the bottom (or towels until I ran out) and stacked the plates on their edges on top the newspaper wads.  I put enough pieces in the box to keep everything from rattling around.

This is the same method the movers used for my Mom’s Apple dishes.

For glasses I used the paper again, wrapped each glass separately and placed in the box on top wadded paper.  I have a ton of bubble wrap bags and put my Rose Point stems in those bubble bags, then into a box.  (Those boxes went in the car, not in Dave’s cargo trailer.)

My glass inventory is all in the bubble bags, held in those boxes that copier paper comes in.  Had I wanted the movers to take my glass, they would have rewrapped everything using the paper method.  Not only was this expensive, at the end I’d have a bunch of glass all mish mashed up, that I had to re-organize.

I figure that doing the wrapping myself saved us several hundred dollars and certainly reduced the mess at the end.  We put as much of the small stuff as we could in Dave’s cargo trailer or the back of the Tahoe and made several trips.  That helped with the moving cost too, but more important, gave me peace of mind for our most precious possessions, artwork, carvings from my Dad, my Mom’s clock and yes, all my glass.