Professional Packing Services in Richmond & Bay Area

Full-service packing means our crew shows up with all the boxes, paper, tape, and protective materials — and packs your entire home from top to bottom. You don't lift a finger.

In practice, that means we wrap and box every dish, glass, lamp, picture frame, and small appliance in your house. We pad-wrap your furniture, shrink-wrap your dressers and nightstands so drawers stay shut in transit, and use specialty cartons for things that need them: dish packs for kitchenware, mirror cartons for art and TVs, wardrobe boxes for hanging clothes, and double-walled cartons for anything heavy or fragile. We label every box by room and contents, and we keep an inventory.

Most people assume "packing" just means filling boxes. The actual job is closer to triage — deciding what goes in which type of box, how to cushion it, what to wrap separately, what to disassemble, and how to label it so unpacking doesn't become its own nightmare. A typical Bay Area family kitchen alone can take a two-person crew several hours when it's done correctly.

We also offer partial packing if you only want help with the rooms you dread — usually the kitchen, the garage, and anything fragile. A lot of our customers pack their own clothes, books, and linens, then have us handle the breakables.

For a typical Bay Area home, professional packing usually adds somewhere between $600 and $2,500 to the total move cost, with most 2–3 bedroom homes landing in the $800–$1,800 range. Bay Area labor rates run higher than the national average — typically $60–$100 per packer per hour — and a 2–3 bedroom home generally takes a two-person crew 6 to 8 hours to pack fully. Larger homes (4+ bedrooms or 3,000+ sq ft) often take a full day or run into a second day.

A few things drive the price up or down:

• Volume of fragile items. A china cabinet, a wine collection, framed art, and a fully stocked kitchen all add hours.
• Materials. A fully packed 2–3 bedroom home typically uses $200–$500 in materials (boxes, paper, bubble wrap, dish packs, wardrobe boxes, tape). We always quote materials as a separate line item so there are no surprises.
• Access. Bay Area realities — third-floor walk-ups in Berkeley, narrow Victorian staircases in San Francisco, long carries from the truck in dense neighborhoods — can add time.
• How packed your home is. Densely lived-in homes take longer than sparsely furnished ones.

The honest math most people miss: if you pack yourself, you're trading roughly $1,000–$1,500 for 40–80 hours of your own time, plus $150–$400 in materials you'll buy anyway, plus the risk that anything you pack incorrectly isn't covered the same way professionally packed items are (more on that below). For a lot of Bay Area households — especially dual-income families — the math tilts toward hiring it out.

We offer partial packing as a middle ground. Having us handle just the kitchen and breakables typically runs $300–$700 and removes the riskiest part of DIY packing.

Most damage in moves doesn't happen because a mover dropped something. It happens because a box got crushed, an item shifted inside the box, or the wrong material was used. Professional materials exist to prevent each of those failure modes.

Here's what we bring and what each one does:

• Double-walled dish pack cartons. These are the heavy, reinforced boxes used for dishes, glassware, and china. They're built with two layers of corrugated cardboard so they don't collapse when other boxes are stacked on top in the truck. A regular grocery store box loses roughly half its strength if it's ever been damp, and almost all of them have been.
• Unprinted (ink-free) packing paper. Newspaper looks like a free packing material, but the ink transfers under the friction and pressure of a move — onto your white plates, onto wood finishes, onto anything porous. We use clean newsprint that wraps without staining.
• Small-bubble and large-bubble bubble wrap. Small bubble for stemware and thin glass (it conforms and absorbs higher-frequency vibration), large bubble for bowls, electronics, and bulkier fragile items. Layered with paper, not as a substitute for it.
• Specialty cartons. Mirror/picture boxes (telescoping cardboard built around the frame), TV boxes with foam corners, wardrobe boxes with a hanging bar so suits and dresses move on their hangers, and lamp cartons tall enough that the shade and base never touch.
• Furniture protection. Moving blankets (quilted pads) for upholstered furniture and wood pieces, stretch wrap to hold pads in place and keep dresser drawers closed, and corner protectors for tabletops and headboards.
• Heavy-duty 2-inch packing tape. Cheap masking tape and shipping tape fail under load. Sealed boxes get an H-pattern across the seams so the bottom doesn't blow out.

The "why it matters" comes down to physics. Plates packed flat crack at much higher rates than plates packed on edge in a divided dish pack — a flat plate can only resist pressure at its rim and center, while a plate on edge flexes like an arch. Glasses with paper but no bubble wrap shatter from vibration on long highway runs. Furniture without pads gets gouged by the strap buckles holding it in the truck. The materials aren't the expensive part of professional packing — the technique is — but the right materials are what make the technique possible.

Yes — and this is one of the most important reasons to consider professional packing.

Under California intrastate moving rules (regulated by the Bureau of Household Goods and Services under Maximum Rate Tariff 4) and federal interstate rules, every box on a moving inventory gets labeled either CP (Carrier Packed) — meaning we packed it — or PBO (Packed By Owner) — meaning you packed it.

That label determines liability:

• If we packed the box (CP): We're responsible for the contents under whatever valuation coverage you've chosen on your contract. If something inside breaks and we packed it, that's our claim to handle.
• If you packed the box (PBO): Movers across the industry — and this is standard in California carrier tariffs — are generally only liable for damage to PBO boxes if there's visible external damage to the box (it's crushed, torn, punctured). If the box arrives looking fine but the contents are broken inside, the standard assumption is internal damage from improper packing, and the claim is typically denied. This is true even if you've paid for Full Value Protection — the PBO exclusion is built into the coverage.

This catches a lot of people off guard. They assume buying upgraded valuation coverage protects everything. It doesn't protect what they packed themselves.

A practical middle path many of our Bay Area customers use: pack your own clothes, linens, books, and other low-risk items, then have us pack everything fragile — kitchen, glassware, art, electronics, china, lamps. Those items are then CP, fully covered, and packed by people who do it every day.

A note on coverage levels: California movers are required to offer basic released-value coverage at no cost ($0.60 per pound per article — minimal protection) and to offer full-value protection for an additional fee. We'll walk you through both options before your move so you know what you're choosing.

Two timelines matter here, and people often confuse them.

Booking the packing service: For a Bay Area local move, book us at least 3–4 weeks ahead for the move date itself, and add an extra week or two if you want full packing services included. During peak season — May through September, end-of-month dates, and weekends — we recommend 4–6 weeks of lead time, sometimes more. The Bay Area moving market gets tight fast around those dates.

When the actual packing happens: That depends on the size of your home and how much we're packing.

• Studio or 1-bedroom apartment: We typically pack the day before or the morning of the move.
• 2-bedroom home: Usually a full day of packing the day before move day.
• 3-bedroom home: One full day of packing the day before, sometimes starting two days before for larger homes.
• 4+ bedroom home or homes with extensive fragile collections: We schedule two days of packing before move day so the crew isn't rushed and the truck loads cleanly on move morning.

We don't recommend packing and loading on the same day for anything larger than a small apartment. The pace of packing requires care; the pace of loading requires speed. Mixing them on a tight timeline is when things get broken.

A few Bay Area-specific scheduling notes worth flagging:

• If you're moving into a building with a freight elevator or COI (certificate of insurance) requirement — common in San Francisco, downtown Oakland, and Emeryville high-rises — book even earlier. Elevator slots get reserved weeks out.
• If your move date falls at the end of the month, lead times effectively double. Most leases turn over on the 1st, so the last week of every month is the busiest.
• Last-minute packing is possible — we do it regularly — but options narrow and the crew has less flexibility to handle unusually fragile or complicated items. Earlier is always better.

Unpacking is the part most people don't think about until they're standing in their new living room surrounded by 80 sealed boxes at 7pm.

When you book unpacking with JH Moving, our crew stays at the destination after the truck is unloaded and:

• Places furniture where you want it (we'll do this with you room by room — easier to get right the first time than to move a sofa twice).
• Unboxes everything from the cartons we packed, sets items on counters, dressers, and tables, and lays out where things go so you can put them in final positions.
• Reassembles furniture we disassembled at the origin — beds, dining tables, desks.
• Removes and hauls away all the packing materials — boxes, paper, bubble wrap, tape. This is the part people most underestimate. A 3-bedroom move generates a small mountain of cardboard and paper; we take it with us.

What unpacking typically does not include: putting individual items into specific drawers, cabinets, or shelves the way you want them organized long-term. We can do that as an extended service, but most people prefer to do it themselves once items are out of boxes — partly because organization is personal, and partly because it's a chance to decide what stays, what goes in storage, and what gets donated.

Pricing: Unpacking runs at a similar hourly rate as packing. For a 2–3 bedroom home, expect $300–$1,200 depending on how much you want unpacked and whether you want furniture reassembled and materials hauled away.

A common Bay Area pattern we see: customers book full packing + full unloading + furniture reassembly + debris haul-away, but skip the cabinet-level unpacking. That gets you into a livable home the same day — bed assembled, kitchen counters cleared of cardboard, art ready to hang — without paying for someone else to decide where your spice jars go.