Posters are a great way to decorate a living space on a budget, so if you happen to have posters on the walls of your home – either in frames or just placed flat, then you’ll definitely want to take most of your posters to the new place. But before you can do it, you’ll have to protect them properly so that they survive the house move without any damage whatsoever.
Packing posters when moving is not complicated in any way – you simply need to follow a few safety tips for packing posters and you’ll find them perfectly intact when unpacking your things in the new home.
Here’s how to pack posters for moving – the step-by-step guide that will enable you to continue to enjoy your posters in your new living space as well.
What to do before packing up your posters
Before we move on to the poster packing tips, there are a couple of steps you’re encouraged to take beforehand to make the packing task easier for yourself.
Step 1. Re-assess the worth of your posters
Take a good look at your posters and think about whether it’ll be worth it to pack and move all of them. You must know your posters in great detail, but now that they are to be transported to an entirely different setting, you may find out that some of those art pieces will not fit the décor of the new place.
What’s more, times change and people do too. So, you shouldn’t be too shocked if you discover that you’re no longer that crazy about some of the posters you adored in the beginning. And if that’s true, then consider giving away some of them to people who you know will enjoy them more. In the case of valuable posters that you no longer appreciate enough, think about selling them to earn some money toward your moving budget.
Also, inspect closely all the posters you own, framed or non-framed, and look for possible damage to them like fading or tears with time. When unsure what to do with some of your posters, finding them partially ruined will make your decision easier.
Step 2. Prepare the packing supplies
Your mission is to transport your favorite posters safe and sound to the destination home. And in order to do that, you’re going to need some quality packing materials to protect them on the road.
- Wrapping paper. Prepare white, acid-free packing paper – the same one you’ve been using to pack up your fragile items.
- Bubble wrap. Bubble wrap will offer the best protection for your framed posters.
- Poster roll tubes. Purchase poster roll tubes for your non-framed posters, either online or from a good home improvement store. Poster tubes start from around $3 a piece and are made either from hard craft paper or from plastic. Their inside diameters range from 1 ½ inch to 4 inches, the length is from around 15 inches to 21 inches, and they come with plastic end caps to keep posters secured inside.
- Picture boxes. Get special picture boxes for your framed posters. Picture boxes cost between $5 and $8, and come in various sizes – medium, large, and four-piece ones that are adjustable to the dimensions of the frame.
- Painter’s tape. One roll of painter’s masking tape should be enough.
Good to know: Bubble wrap vs. Packing paper
How to pack framed posters when moving
Here’s how to pack posters with frames when moving from one home to another:
- Take down your framed posters from the walls and arrange them on a flat surface, like the kitchen table, for example.
- Use a soft and slightly damp cloth to remove any possible dust from the frames – you don’t want to transfer any dust or dirt into the new place, do you?
- Place a large sheet of bubble wrap on the table and position a framed poster in the middle of it with its face upward.
- Cut out a piece of cardboard that matches the dimensions of the frame, then use small bits of masking tape to fix the cardboard cut-out over the face of the frame. This step is required to protect the glass or the plastic sheet that covers the front of the poster.
- Wrap the bubble wrap sheet around the framed poster as if you were wrapping a present. Make sure you cover the entire frame.
- Use pieces of regular packing tape to secure the open ends of the bubble wrap bundle.
- Transfer the bundled framed poster into a medium or large picture box depending on its size. If the frame proves to be too large, then you should be able to put together 2 picture boxes to create 1 – most picture boxes are capable of being telescoped together with other picture boxes to accommodate framed art pieces that are too big to fit into a single one.
- Label appropriately the picture box in order to know exactly what’s inside the cardboard container.
See also: How to pack pictures for moving
How to pack non-framed posters when moving
If you have posters that are not in frames, then the packing process is way different than the one we just described.
Here’s the best way to pack posters for moving:
- Take down your posters from the walls. How you do that exactly will depend on how they are fixed to wall: tape, thumbtacks, or glue. Be careful not to tear any poster in the process.
- Lay a sheet of clean packing paper on a hard surface, preferably a large table. Make sure the packing paper has a larger surface area than the poster itself.
- Place a poster onto the sheet of wrapping paper with its picture side up – that is, facing you. Place the poster in such a way as the bottom edge is lined with the bottom edge of the packing paper.
- Start rolling the poster together with the sheet of packing paper below it. Do this slowly and make sure you’re rolling it tight enough so that the resulted roll can fit inside the poster tube.
- Wrap up the ends of the wrapping paper like you’d wrap a piece of candy.
- Place a small piece of tape onto the open seam once you’ve rolled up the poster. This step is necessary to prevent the poster roll from unrolling while inside the tube.
- Insert some soft packing paper into the bottom of the poster roll tube to serve as a cushion.
- Slide carefully the rolled-up poster into the poster tube, place some more wrapping paper on the top for extra padding.
- Fit the plastic end cap, then place a bit of tape over it to secure it well and prevent it from opening during transit.
- Use sticky labels to label each poster toll tube, so that you know what’s inside it.
Use your judgment to determine whether you can pack more than one poster inside a single poster tube. In most cases, it’s ok to do it because you’ll save on poster roll tubes. Just make sure you separate each poster with a clean sheet of packing paper.
Useful info: Should you hire professional packers?
