Box Packing Calculator

Box counts for a move are estimated from room inventories rather than from measured volume, because household goods are heterogeneous and almost never catalogued. Standard moving cartons come in a small set of sizes: a small or book carton is roughly 16 by 12 by 12 inches at about 1.5 cubic feet, a medium runs about 18 by 18 by 16 inches at 3 cubic feet, a large is about 18 by 18 by 24 inches at 4.5 to 6 cubic feet, and a dish pack or china barrel is double-walled at roughly 5.2 cubic feet. Density governs the assignment: dense goods such as books, canned food and hand tools go in small cartons to hold each box under about 50 pounds, while pillows, bedding and lampshades fill the large sizes. A per-room allowance is then scaled by a packing style factor, commonly 0.7 for minimal wrapping, 1.0 for average handling and 1.3 for individually wrapping every item. Typical outcomes are 25 to 35 cartons for a studio, 30 to 50 for a two-bedroom apartment, and 100 to 190 for a four-bedroom house with a full garage. The estimate is only as good as the inventory assumption, and garages, basements and attics are the spaces most often undercounted. Supplies scale with box count at roughly one tape roll per fifteen cartons and about half a pound of packing paper per carton, while packing labor runs near 0.3 hours per carton for one person working unassisted.

The corrugated shipping carton is a nineteenth-century invention. Corrugated paper was patented in England in 1856 as a stiffener for hat brims, and Albert Jones of New York received a United States patent in 1871 for single-faced corrugated board used to wrap bottles and glass chimneys. Robert Gair of Brooklyn is credited with making folding cartons a mass-production item after discovering that a cutting rule set slightly higher than a creasing rule could cut and score paperboard in a single pass, allowing flat blanks to be produced in quantity and folded where they were used. The National Biscuit Company adoption of a pre-printed folding carton for Uneeda Biscuit in 1898 put the format into mainstream retail distribution. Corrugated boxes were accepted for common carrier shipment in the United States only after a series of freight classification rulings in the early 1900s, which specified minimum board strength by the Mullen burst test and, much later, by the edge crush test. That requirement is why box bottoms still carry a printed box maker certificate stamp giving the board grade and size limits. The particular carton sizes used in household moving were settled by the moving trade during the postwar decades, when van lines and self-service rental operators such as U-Haul, founded in 1945, needed a consistent catalogue of cartons for tariff weight estimates, pricing and retail sale to do-it-yourself movers.