What our packing services include
Our packing services in Austin cover boxing up the house before the truck comes and unpacking it after. We bring the cartons, packing paper, bubble wrap, tape, wardrobe boxes, and dish and glass kits. Packers are billed by the hour, materials are charged at cost, and a 2,000 square foot house is typically a full day for a two-person packing team. Most packs happen the day before the move, so the crew loads a house that is already ready.
Titan Moving & Delivery is family owned with a crew of seven, based at 4200 Burch Dr in Del Valle. Eliseo “Lee” Lucio III has been packing and hauling since he started with his father in the late 1990s, and the company runs 4.7 stars across 47 Google reviews, 44 of them five-star.
Full pack, partial pack, and unpacking
- Full pack: every room, every cabinet, every closet. You keep out a suitcase and we do the rest, label the boxes by room, and stack them where the loaders can reach them.
- Partial pack: the rooms people dread. Usually the kitchen, the china cabinet, the garage, and anything framed or fragile, while you handle the clothes and the books.
- Unpacking: boxes opened, contents set on flat surfaces or placed where you want them, and the empty cartons and paper hauled out so you are not living in a cardboard fort for a month.
- Fragile only: art, mirrors, TVs, stemware, marble and glass tops. These get crated or edge-protected instead of wrapped and hoped for.
Packing pairs with whatever move you booked. Most of our packing customers are on an hourly local move, and the rest are heading out of the metro on one of our longer moving services.
We pack south of town as often as we pack in the city, and the two jobs look nothing alike. A student apartment in San Marcos is a kitchen, a closet, and half a day. A four-bedroom in Kyle with a stocked pantry, a garage, and a china cabinet is two packers and a full one, and it is the kind of house where paying for the pack saves you hours on the truck the next morning.
How much packing costs
Packing is billed the same way a move is: by the hour, per packer, plus materials at cost. That means the price tracks how much stuff you own and how fragile it is, not a made-up flat fee.
Typical timing, for a two-person team:
- One-bedroom apartment: about 3 to 5 hours for a full pack.
- Two to three bedroom house: most of a day.
- 2,000 square feet: a full day, and a heavily furnished one with a packed garage and attic can push into a second half-day.
- Kitchen only: usually 2 to 4 hours, which is the best value in the whole service.
Materials for an average three-bedroom house typically land in the low hundreds of dollars. We bring more than we think we need and only bill what gets used.
The packing materials we bring
Good packing is mostly a materials problem. Most of the breakage we see on other people’s moves comes from a box that was half empty, over-stuffed, or the wrong shape for what went in it.
- Dish barrels and cell kits: double-walled boxes with dividers, for plates, glasses, and stemware.
- Wardrobe boxes: hanging clothes go straight from the closet rod to the box and back out, still on their hangers.
- Mirror and picture cartons: telescoping boxes for framed art, mirrors, and TVs, with corner protection.
- Paper, bubble, and foam: unprinted newsprint that does not leave ink on your dishes.
- Custom crating: for stone tops, glass, and anything else that will not survive a strap.
Every box gets labeled with the room it belongs to, and the ones with fragile contents get marked on more than one side so a loader can see it from any angle.
What a packing day looks like
Packers usually come the day before the truck. They walk the house with you first, agree on what is going and what you are keeping out, then work room by room rather than jumping around, so at any point you can see exactly where they are. Boxes get sealed, labeled, and stacked in a spot that will not block the crew on move day.
You do not have to hover. Most people leave one person in the house to answer questions, and the biggest help you can give is a decision: this goes, this stays, this rides in my car. What slows a packing crew down is not work, it is waiting on an answer about a shelf of things nobody wants to make a call on.
Is it worth paying for packing
It is worth it in three situations, and honestly not in the others. If you are working full time and moving in under two weeks, hire packers, because the alternative is packing at midnight and loading a truck on no sleep. If you own real fragile weight, like a china set, framed art, a marble top, or a wall of glassware, hire packers, because a broken heirloom costs more than the labor did. If you are moving long distance, hire packers at least for the breakables, because a thousand miles of road vibration finds every loose box.
If you have four weeks, a normal amount of stuff, and a couple of free weekends, pack it yourself and put the money toward a bigger crew on moving day. We will tell you that on the phone. It is also worth knowing that a badly packed house makes the move itself run long, so the money you save packing yourself can come back as extra hours on the truck if the boxes are not closed and stacked when we arrive.
The kitchen is the room to hand off
If you buy packing help for one room, buy it for the kitchen. It holds the most items per square foot, the widest mix of shapes, and almost everything in it is breakable, heavy, or both. It is also the room you use until the last morning, which is why it is the one still half-open when the truck pulls up. Packers work it in a few hours with dish barrels and cell kits, which is the part most people do not own and end up improvising with towels.
The garage is the second candidate. It is not fragile, but it is heavy, sharp, and full of things nobody wants to sort at 11 p.m.
How to get the most out of a packing crew
Purge before we arrive, because you are paying by the hour to box things up, and every bag going to a donation center is money you keep. Decide in advance what stays with you rather than going on the truck: documents, medications, jewelry, keys, chargers, and a week of clothes. Point out anything valuable or breakable when the team walks in, because we would rather over-protect it than guess. And leave the boxes where we can reach them, because a stack that blocks the hallway costs loading time on move day.
Getting a packing quote
Tell us the size of the home, the date the truck comes, and whether you want the whole house, the fragile items, or just the kitchen. Lee will put a written estimate together with the crew size, the hourly rate, and a materials range. Quotes are free and there is no deposit. If you need the specialty pieces handled as well, the safes, pianos, hot tubs, and stone tops, that work is covered on our specialty moving page.