When preparing to move antique items, it is recommended that you hire professionals with a lot of experience who know what they are doing. But if this decision doesn’t fit your moving budget and you cannot afford hiring a professional moving company to move your antique furniture, you need to come up with quality preparations in order to successfully pack your antiques.
A great challenge is ahead of you
As you stand in the middle of the room and look at your antique pieces, it will hit you just how challenging this task is. You don’t have a professional assistance and your antique furniture is massive, heavy, fragile and very valuable. Moreover, if you are moving long distance, you will have to make sure the packing part is perfect to avoid any problems during transportation. But, before you start doubting yourself, it might be complicated to pack and move your antiques but it is doable.
How to prepare for packing
In order to make your antique furniture lighter and to avoid risk damaging the pieces, you should take out all the contents. It will reduce the weight of the objects and minimize the risk of the contents damaging the furniture. Also, if possible, make sure you remove doors, legs, knobs and other parts that can be detached. And if you don’t have an option to remove the doors, make sure you secure them so that they don’t open during the transportation. It is important to do the same with other loose elements of your antique furniture. Another important tip you should take into consideration is not to use tape directly onto the surfaces. You don’t want to damage the surfaces with sticky traces of the tape that cannot be cleaned. You can use tape but only over other wrappings like moving blankets, bubble wrap, etc.
Packing time
After you have emptied your antique furniture and prepared necessary packing supplies, it is time to pack and wrap your valuable antiques. First you need to focus on protecting delicate surfaces from dust, moisture, scratches, loss of paint and other damage. The best materials that can be used for protection are packing paper and thin sheets of plastic wrap. However, it would be ideally to combine these two materials, but you need to put the soft paper first and then plastic wrap because if you do other way around, you are preventing your wood furniture to breathe. The moisture can appear which can have disastrous consequences to your antiques. After you finish with protecting delicate surfaces, it is time to wrap it with moving blankets to protect it from vibrations and shock during transportation. You can buy protective blankets from professional moving companies or stores that specialize in selling moving equipment. After you place them around the furniture, you can use tape or ropes to secure them. And finally, wrap your antiques into a sturdy cardboard and wrap them with tape. This final packing step will ensure a safe transportation to your new address.