How I Finally Learned to Pack My Plates & Eliminate My Manhattan Moving Day Heartaches

So as we all know, one of the keys to living in Manhattan is having the right roommates. Before I managed that, I had all of the wrong roommates – from the amazingly uptight control freak who would flip out if you used the wrong kind of cleaning supplies to the super slob who had never heard of cleaning supplies. I did a lot of moving, going from apartment to apartment, and every single time, without fail, one or more of my plates got broken.

I’ve got to tell you the truth: this irritated me way more than it should have bothered anyone. For goodness sake, how hard is it to pack plates? You go in the store and there are shelves full of plates. Clearly they were all delivered to the store without getting broken – but I couldn’t manage to transport my rapidly-dwindling pile of plates to another apartment in the same neighborhood without one getting damaged in the process. I ordered replacement plates online: they showed up completely intact. Some people would have appreciated the irony. I am not one of those people.

When it became clear that another move was on the horizon – and this time, the roommate was actually pretty decent, but the building was going co-op – I made it my personal mission to find the best way to pack plates. At this point, there were only 4 surviving plates, and with God as my witness, there were going to be 4 plates after I moved.

My Four Plates

The process started by reviewing all the methods I knew didn’t work. Bubble wrap? Useless. Newspaper? Failed me way more than once. The slacker roommate’s solution of wrapping breakables in clothing before putting them into moving boxes? I lost three plates in that move – although, to be fair, the box those plates were in got dropped and tumbled halfway down a flight of stairs.

That left me with methods I hadn’t tried yet, which I’d gathered from the internet and Facebook and my co-workers and roommates. On that list were tips like hiring professional movers to pack my plates- and the rest of my stuff –  for me, which was definitely tempting and a suggestion to consider the job from another angle: instead of packing my plates in their ordinary position, with the bottoms down and the tops up, pack plates vertically in a moving box. Positioned on their side, with a layer of protective material in between each plate (I used cardboard), the plates are apparently subjected to less stress during the move.

It was the moment of truth. I packed the four plates vertically, handed the boxes over the movers, and watched them go, truly anxious as to their fate. You know that box was the very first box I unpacked in the new apartment and guess what? It worked! It really, really worked. The plates didn’t break, crack, chip, or shatter. They were practically perfect in every way, as Mary Poppins would say.

So there you go. That’s the true story of how I finally learned to pack my plates and eliminate at least a little bit of moving day heartache. I offer it to you in the hopes you too will try it and keep your plates intact during your next move.