Pads per piece, not pads per room
A pad count keyed to bedrooms falls apart on the first house with a dining table and six chairs in it. What decides the number is how many finished surfaces are going on the truck and how awkward each one is to cover. A dresser takes one pad and a bit; a three seat sofa takes two and a half because there is no flat face to lay one against; an appliance takes two because it is tall, square and heavy enough to mark whatever it touches.
| Item | Default | Count | Pads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Case furniture | 1.5 each | 12 | 18.0 |
| Upholstery | 2.5 each | 4 | 10.0 |
| Appliances | 2 each | 3 | 6.0 |
| Mirrors, art, glass | 1 each | 6 | 6.0 |
| Total | 25 padded items | 40 |
Forty pads for twenty-five padded items — twenty-nine things on the truck once the four mattresses are counted, since a mattress takes a bag rather than a pad — is an ordinary answer, and it is roughly four times what most people put on a rental order the first time. The failure mode is not a scratch on the dresser; it is that at pad eighteen you start putting furniture against furniture, and everything after that gets loaded worse than everything before it.
Wrap is not padding
Stretch film is often sold as furniture protection and it does not protect anything from impact — it is a few tenths of a millimetre of plastic. Its jobs are holding a pad on without tape touching a finish, keeping drawers and cabinet doors shut, and keeping upholstery off a dirty deck. Applied straight to a polished surface on a long trip it can hold moisture against the finish, which is the opposite of what was intended. Pad first, then film over the pad.
Forty feet a piece is about two and a half turns round a six foot sofa. On the default settings that is twenty pieces wrapped and 800 feet of film, which is inside one thousand foot roll with room to spare. Wrapping over pads rather than bare pushes the per-piece figure up, so raise it if that is the plan.
Rent or buy
Forty pads at $1.25 for the move is $50.00. The same forty bought outright is $380.00, so on cost alone buying pays back on the eighth move, and almost nobody moves eight times. The reason people buy them anyway is that a stack of moving pads is one of the more useful things in a garage afterwards, which is a real argument and a completely different one from the moving budget. The calculator prices both and takes no side.
Straps, tiers and the floor
A truck gets loaded in blocks: build from the front wall back to a strap rail, tie that block off, start the next. A 20 foot deck in 4 foot blocks is five tiers and five straps at one per tier. Two per tier is common on a long trip or with tall load, and the field is there for that. What straps are not is the same question as tying something to an open trailer, where working load limits and aggregate ratings apply — that is the tie-down calculator, and it matters far more.
Floor runner is the line people leave off and then argue about later. A hundred and eighty feet of carry route across two houses on a wet day, over carpet in one of them, is a cheap roll against a cleaning charge. It is also the only item on this list that protects a property you are handing back rather than a possession you are keeping.
Questions people ask
How many moving blankets do I need?
Count furniture pieces rather than rooms. Around one and a half pads per case piece, two and a half per upholstered piece, two per appliance and one per mirror or picture gives forty for a house with twenty-five padded items in it. That is several times the usual first guess, and running out is worse than it sounds because everything loaded after you run out gets stacked against bare furniture.
Do I need stretch wrap as well as blankets?
They do different jobs. The blanket is the padding; the film holds it on, keeps drawers and doors shut, and keeps fabric off a dirty deck. Film on its own protects against dirt and nothing else, and film applied straight to a polished finish for several days can trap moisture against it. Pad first, film over the pad, and buy the film by the roll length you will actually use rather than by the roll.
Is it cheaper to rent or buy moving blankets?
On the move itself, renting, and it is not close: on the default figures here renting forty pads is $50.00 against $380.00 to buy them, which pays back on the eighth move. Buying is a decision about what a stack of pads is worth in a garage afterwards rather than a decision about the move. Enter both prices from your own quotes and the calculator shows the payback in moves.
How many straps does a moving truck need?
One per tier of load is the working figure, and a tier is however deep a block you build before tying it off — commonly three to five feet. A twenty foot deck in four foot blocks is five tiers. Tall or heavy tiers, or a long drive, is where two per tier earns its place. This is a different question from tying cargo to an open trailer, which has its own ratings and is far less forgiving.
Do I need a hand truck and a furniture dolly, or just one?
They solve different problems. A hand truck carries boxes and appliances upright on two wheels; a four-wheel furniture dolly slides a heavy flat item across a floor. A crew of three will use both, usually at the same time, and the shortage that slows a move down is not having two hand trucks so that one person is never waiting for the other. The defaults assume one hand truck for every two people carrying.