What never to put in a moving box

You are holding a half empty bottle of detergent. The box is open on the table, the afternoon is gone, and all you want is to close it and start the next one. The cap is screwed on, it is only for two days, and it fits.

Almost every packing job that goes wrong goes wrong like this. Not because of bad technique, but because of a decision made at seven in the evening, object already in hand. Three questions sort out what does not belong in a box, and they are worth asking before you start.

If it has a flame symbol, it does not travel in a box

Paint and solvents, white spirit, alcohol, lighters, aerosols, the camping gas canister, the barbecue lighting fluid. The test is printed on the label and needs no chemistry: the flame symbol, or the line "keep away from heat".

The problem is not the journey, which takes twenty minutes. What matters is either side of it: the boxes wait stacked, inside a van shut up in the sun, for half a day, and a pressurised container among the bed linen sits in the part of the move that nobody is watching.

This sort of thing travels on its own: an open crate, upright, every cap checked one by one. Or it does not travel at all. When you go down to clear the cellar that is where you find most of it, and the tin of paint from the bathroom you redid six years ago has already given you its answer: you will not open it in the new place either. It goes to the recycling centre now, not once the boxes are shut.

The same goes for loose lithium batteries: power banks, drill batteries, the old phone in a drawer. They do not go into a box with their contacts exposed, and in summer they have one more problem.

If you cannot buy it again, it stays with you

Documents, passport, the dog's vaccination record, keys, jewellery, the hard drive with ten years of photographs, the medicines you take every day.

This list is not the one for the first evening: the toothbrush, the charger and the bed sheets are in the moving checklist. Here the question is a different one, and shorter: if this box never arrived, could I buy it again?

Anything that answers no travels in a bag you keep on you, and does not go in the van. Not because something is bound to go wrong, but because it is the one group where a mistake cannot be put right.

The things that look harmless

Open liquids come first. Shampoo, oil, detergent, the bottle of vinegar: a screw top holds on a level shelf, not upside down under three other boxes, with ten degrees between the morning and the afternoon. If a liquid has to travel, it goes in a sealed bag on its own, not among the clothes.

Then there is open and loose food, which in two days attracts insects and leaves a smell in the fabric. And damp things: the towel you used that same morning, the shower curtain, the soil from the pots. A box shut for forty eight hours with something wet inside goes mouldy. Plants travel another way, and soil does not go in any box.

On this point a rented box has a constraint that a box of your own does not, and it matters before you book: it comes back and goes to somebody else, so what must not go in is written in the frequently asked questions, and if you are unsure you ask first. When the box is your own you decide alone, and if something leaks you find out as you unpack.

What changes is the remedy, when you notice afterwards. The Cangubox lid is built in and closes without tape, so opening number nine again to take that bottle out means lifting two flaps: no knife to find, no tape to cut and none to put back on. And the box reaches you checked and washed after the previous return, so what the person before you put in it is not your concern.

Weight is not a thing you pack, but it behaves like one

An object can be perfectly fine inside a box and still stay out of the one in front of you, which is already full.

There is a single practical rule: if you cannot lift it off the floor without changing the position of your back, take something out. It matters most with books, which run out of weight long before they run out of room. Each Cangubox takes 30 kg, the figure the supplier declares, but that is not the number that decides. What decides is how much you can lift, and it changes with stairs, with the lift and with the time of day.

The way to avoid deciding with the object in your hand is to decide first. Before you open the first box, make three piles somewhere: what travels with you, what travels on its own and upright, what does not travel at all. It takes fifteen minutes, and it removes the three decisions you get wrong in the evening.

Then pack. When something turns up in your hand and you do not know where to put it, it is not a fourth group: it is one of the three, and you already know which.