Posts by mibox

Late September in New Hampshire is garage season. The mower is winding down, the snowblower is about to move to the front of the bay, and half of Concord and Manchester is staring at a wall of bins, bikes, and paint cans wondering where it all came from. A garage is the hardest room in the house to pack because nothing in it matches: heavy tools, awkward lawn gear, fragile holiday decorations, and things that legally should not go in a storage container at all. Here is how to sort, prep, and load a garage into a MI-BOX the right way.

Start by Sorting Into Four Piles

Before a single box gets packed, pull everything to the driveway and split it into four groups. This one step saves you from packing junk you will only throw out in the spring, and it keeps banned items out of the container.

• Keep and store: tools, sports gear, seasonal decor, and equipment you will not need for a few months.
• Keep and use: the snowblower, shovels, ice melt, and anything you need through a NH winter. These stay out.
• Toss or donate: broken tools, dried-out paint, and the treadmill nobody has touched since 2019.
• Never store: gasoline, propane, lawn chemicals, and other flammables. See our NH guide to what not to store before you load.

Prep Tools and Hardware

Hand tools and power tools survive storage fine as long as they go in dry and organized. Wipe metal surfaces down, then guard against rust and lost pieces.

1. Wipe and oil metal. A light coat of machine oil on saw blades, wrenches, and garden tools keeps flash rust off during a damp NH shoulder season.
2. Bag the small stuff. Screws, bits, and hardware go in labeled zip bags inside a single sturdy tote, not loose in a drawer that will spill.
3. Box power tools with their chargers. Keep each drill, driver, and its batteries together so you are not hunting in March.
4. Pull batteries out. Remove alkaline and lithium batteries from tools and flashlights so a slow leak does not ruin them.

Heavy toolboxes and hardware go in small boxes. A box of sockets feels light until it is the size of a milk crate, and then nobody can lift it.

Lawn and Snow Equipment: The Fall Swap

This is the part that trips people up. Mowers, trimmers, and leaf blowers can go into storage for the winter, but only after the fuel is dealt with. Gasoline cannot ride in the container, and stale fuel gums up a carburetor by spring.

• Run the mower or trimmer dry, or drain the tank into an approved can that stays at home.
• Disconnect the spark plug and wipe the deck clean of caked grass.
• Stand rakes, shovels, and long-handled tools upright in a barrel or strap them flat along a container wall so they do not slide.
• Keep the snowblower, roof rake, and ice melt out of the container entirely. You will want those the first week of December.

Bikes, Sports Gear, and Seasonal Decor

The odd shapes are what make a garage feel impossible. A little prep makes them stack instead of sprawl.

• Bikes: lower the seats, loosen or turn the handlebars, and hang them from a wall rail inside the container if you have one, or line them up wheel-to-frame against a side wall.
• Sports gear: deflate balls, nest helmets and pads in a bin, and bundle hockey sticks or ski poles together with a strap.
• Holiday decor: pack ornaments and lights in their own clearly marked boxes. These are fragile and you will want them findable in December, so keep them near the door.
• Ladders and long items: lay them flat against a wall or across the top of a stable row, never leaning where they can tip.

Load the Container So You Can Still Get In

A garage packed at random becomes a wall you cannot get past. Load with weight and access in mind. Heaviest items go on the floor and against the walls, lighter and fragile boxes go on top, and anything you might need before spring stays right by the doors. A 16ft container comfortably swallows a typical two-car garage; a smaller 8ft box handles a single-bay cleanout. If you are not sure which fits, our post on organizing a 16ft container walks through the layout, and loading for easy access covers the aisle trick.

Garage-Packing Mistakes to Avoid

• Packing fueled equipment as-is. Gas and propane are the number-one reason a load gets flagged. Empty tanks first.
• Oversized tool boxes. Split heavy hardware across several small boxes so they stay liftable.
• Skipping the winter set-aside. Bury the snowblower and you will regret it during the first storm off Route 93.
• No moisture control. A few desiccant packs or a cheap moisture absorber keeps tools and decor dry through a damp NH winter.

Reclaim the Bay Before the Snow Flies

A garage cleanout is really a two-season problem: get the summer gear packed and out of the way, and leave the winter gear where you can grab it. Do the sorting first, prep the fuel-powered equipment before it goes in, and load the container so the front stays open. Handle those three things and your MI-BOX turns the messiest room in the house into the easiest one. Also worth a read before the cold sets in: how to winterize a storage container in NH.

Local NH Cities We Deliver To

We deliver portable storage containers across Central, Southern, and Western New Hampshire. Most-requested cities: Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Bedford, Laconia, Tilton, and Franklin. Don’t see your town? We probably deliver there too — get a quote.

A sectional that survived three moves can still come out of storage with a cracked leg or a mildew smell if it went in wrong. Furniture is the bulkiest, heaviest, and most awkward thing most New Hampshire homeowners store, and it is also the easiest to damage when a container sits through a Concord winter or a humid Lakes Region August. Whether you are staging a house in Bedford or clearing a room for a renovation in Laconia, a few hours of careful prep is what decides whether your pieces come back looking the same as when they left.

Start With a Plan and the Right Supplies

Furniture packing goes sideways when people improvise halfway through. Gather everything before you carry a single piece out, and clear a staging area so you can wrap on a clean surface instead of a gritty garage floor. A driveway container helps here: you can wrap a piece and walk it straight into the MI-BOX rather than shuttling loads to a rented truck on a clock. Here is the short supply list that covers almost every piece in a house:

• Moving blankets or furniture pads — the single most important item for wood and upholstery.
• Stretch wrap (the plastic cling roll) to hold pads in place, plus a roll of painter’s tape that will not leave residue.
• Bubble wrap and flattened boxes for glass tops, mirrors, and shelf panels.
• A labeled zip-top bag for the screws, bolts, and Allen keys from anything you take apart.
• A cordless drill, a marker, and a few clean sheets or old bedspreads for a final dust layer.

Disassemble What You Can

Every piece you break down is a piece that packs flatter, survives the move better, and frees up cubic feet. Work in this order so nothing gets lost or forced:

1. Remove legs and hardware first. Table legs, bed rails, and cabinet knobs come off in minutes and prevent the snapped-leg problem entirely.
2. Bag and tape the fasteners to the piece. Drop every screw into a labeled bag and tape it to the underside of the tabletop or headboard it belongs to — not to a communal bin you will regret later.
3. Take apart bed frames and modular sectionals. Photograph the assembly first so reassembly in your new place is a five-minute job, not an afternoon.
4. Empty and secure drawers. Light drawers can stay in and act as storage; heavy ones should come out so the dresser is not carried by a joint that was never meant to bear weight.

Wrap and Protect Each Piece by Material

Different materials fail in different ways, so match the protection to what you are storing. A quick rundown of the pieces MI-BOX customers ask about most:

• Sofas and upholstered chairs. Vacuum them first, then cover fully in moving blankets. Stand a sofa on its end only if the frame allows it — it takes far less floor space and keeps cushions from compressing.
• Mattresses. Slide into a proper mattress bag and store flat if possible. A mattress stored on its side for months can sag and lose support at the edges.
• Solid wood tables and dressers. Pad every corner, then blanket-wrap the whole piece. Corners and feet take the hits during loading.
• Glass, mirrors, and marble tops. Bubble wrap, sandwich between flattened cardboard, mark them fragile, and always store them standing on edge, never flat where weight can land on them.

Loading Furniture Into the Container

How you load matters as much as how you wrap. A container that shifts on the drive to your storage lot can undo careful packing in one pothole, and New Hampshire’s frost-heaved back roads are not gentle. Think of the container like a puzzle where nothing should be able to slide, tip, or press down on a delicate surface. Avoid the mistakes that cost people the most:

• Load heavy and flat first. Dressers, sofas, and headboards go against the walls and floor; this builds a stable base and keeps weight low.
• Fill the gaps. Boxes, cushions, and soft goods packed into empty spaces stop everything from sliding during transport.
• Never rest weight on a fabric or glass surface. Stack only onto flat, hard, protected tops — and keep anything fragile at the very top.
• Leave a walking path if you will need access. If this is medium- or long-term storage, load so you can reach the pieces you may want back first.

An 8-foot MI-BOX holds a room or two of furniture, a 16-foot handles a typical two- or three-bedroom home, and a 20-foot fits a large household with room to spare. If you are unsure, our container size guide walks through it. For pieces that will sit for months, our long-term storage prep tips cover moisture control, and the same care applies to dishware in our fragile-items packing guide.

A Little Prep Now, No Surprises Later

The homeowners who open their container months later and find everything intact are not lucky — they wrapped by material, took apart what they could, and loaded heavy pieces low and tight. Furniture is expensive to replace and impossible to fake, so the hour you spend padding corners in your driveway pays for itself the day you move back in. It also makes the far end easier: pieces that went in labeled, wrapped, and photographed come back out in order instead of as a puzzle you have to solve on move-in day. When you are ready for the container itself, MI-BOX delivers across the state and leaves it with you for as long as the job takes.

Local NH Cities We Deliver To

We deliver portable storage containers across Central, Southern, and Western New Hampshire. Most-requested cities: Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Bedford, Merrimack, Laconia, and Derry. Don’t see your town? We probably deliver there too — get a quote.

The single question we hear more than any other is a simple one: what size container do I actually need? Order too small and you are stuck making a second trip or renting a second unit. Order too big and you are paying for air and wrestling with a load that shifts around on the drive. The good news is that MI-BOX of New Hampshire keeps it simple with three sizes: 8-foot, 16-foot, and 20-foot. Here is how to match the right one to your project without guesswork.

Start With What You Are Storing, Not the Square Footage

People often try to reverse-engineer a container size from their home’s square footage, but that number is misleading because it includes hallways, bathrooms, and closets you are not emptying. A far better method is to count the rooms’ worth of furniture and boxes you actually plan to load, then add a little margin for the awkward items, like bikes, a lawnmower, or a mattress, that never stack neatly. Walk the house and tally it in rooms. That single habit gets most NH homeowners to the right size on the first try.

As a quick starting point, think of it in rooms: one to two rooms points to the 8-foot, three to four rooms points to the 16-foot, and five or more rooms points to the 20-foot. Those are guidelines, not hard limits, because how you pack matters as much as how much you own. A garage full of loose gear eats space faster than the same volume packed into uniform boxes, so when your load is bulky or oddly shaped, round up rather than down.

The 8-Foot MI-BOX: Small Jobs and Tight Driveways

The 8-foot container is the workhorse for focused projects. It comfortably holds roughly a room or two of furniture and boxes, which makes it the right call for a studio or one-bedroom apartment, a dorm or seasonal cleanout, or the classic staging move where you pull excess out of the house before it goes on the market. It is also the easiest to place, so when a driveway is short or steep, the 8-foot is often the only unit that fits without blocking the garage or the sidewalk. Think of it as the surgical option: one clear job, in and out.

The 16-Foot MI-BOX: The Most Popular Choice

If you are not sure where to land, the 16-foot container is usually the answer, and it is the size most NH households end up choosing. It swallows roughly three to four rooms’ worth of belongings, which covers the typical two- or three-bedroom home, a mid-size move, or a whole-room renovation where the furniture needs to disappear for a few weeks. It hits the sweet spot on value: big enough that most families finish in a single container, small enough to sit on an average suburban driveway without drama. When people describe a normal household move, this is almost always the box they mean.

The 20-Foot MI-BOX: Whole-Home Moves and Big Projects

The 20-foot container is built for the big lifts. It handles roughly a four-bedroom home or larger, a full-house move, a major renovation, or a garage and basement cleanout that has been building for a decade. It is also the one contractors and small businesses reach for when they need real capacity for equipment, seasonal inventory, or jobsite materials. The trade-off is footprint: it needs a genuine stretch of flat, accessible driveway. If you have the room and the volume, though, consolidating into one 20-foot unit beats juggling two smaller ones.

When to Size Up, and When to Rent Two

A few rules of thumb save people from the most common sizing mistakes:

• When you are on the fence between two sizes, size up. The cost difference is modest next to the headache of running out of room mid-load.
• Loading over several weeks? Lean smaller and stage it. If you are packing slowly while your home is listed, an 8-foot you fill and swap can be tidier than a half-empty 20-foot sitting for a month.
• Storing long-term? Leave a walkway. Do not pack a container wall to wall if you will need to reach items later. Size up one step so you can keep an aisle.
• Big move plus a tight driveway? Two drops beat one squeeze. Two 8-foot or 16-foot units delivered in sequence can move a whole house even when a 20-foot cannot physically fit.

And remember there is no 12-foot option to agonize over. With three clear sizes, the decision comes down to how many rooms you are moving and how much driveway you have to work with. When in doubt, describe the job to us and we will point you to the size that fits.

Local NH Cities We Deliver To

We deliver portable storage containers across Central, Southern, and Western New Hampshire. Most-requested cities: Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Bedford, Merrimack, Laconia, and Derry. Comparing your options? See how MI-BOX compares to PODS, or explore our moving and storage containers. Don’t see your town? We probably deliver there too — get a quote.