If you have recently relocated to another city or have shifted your home within the same city, then you will be aware of this problem. You must have been very excited about the move, planning each step carefully, got all your household goods packed neatly and got them transported to your new house. Till that time your main worry was whether everything will reach the destination intact or not. Then the unpacking got done now you got a new problem at hand: what to do with the enormous volume of boxes and wrapping material that was left behind?
The clutter that these leftover materials cause is very difficult to manage, to say the least. They can eat into every inch of empty space in your house! Your new home does not look cozy and livable at all till you are able to dispose of them completely. It is a major practical problem that everyone who has ever shifted his house has had to deal with. Here are ways in which you can solve this problem:
Ask your professional mover to help: If you had used the services of a professional mover during moving, they would have brought these boxes, packing blankets, corrugated sheets and bubble wraps with them. Since most of these items are reusable, some movers take them back after the shifting is over for reuse. If unpacking is done on the same day, this is possible free of charge. However if you are keeping the cartons for unpacking later and require the packer to collect the cartons back on a later date, you might have to pay for transportation of the same. If you want to retain some boxes, you can pay them extra and the boxes will become yours Once unpacking is done, you can call the professional movers to come and remove the boxes. In fact, this is the easiest way to clear your house of all the clutter.
Give them away: If you had completed the shifting by yourself, or the professional moving company is not taking the boxes back, then you can giving the boxes away to people who need it. Talk to your friends, relatives, and neighbor and tell them that you have some spare boxes and other packing materials which you would want to donate. Anyone who needs boxes for their personal use or someone who is planning to shift in the near future will happily take the boxes away.
Donate to Charity: Many NGO and other charitable organizations regularly look for these boxes to store their belongings. Apart from this, there are many organizations who teach handicrafts to the poor and the needy. They can create beautiful artifacts from these boxes and sell them in order to earn some money. If you want to help the society with something that you anyways don't need, this is a great option.
Sell them online: If you want to recover a part of the cost of the boxes and packing materials, then you can post on social media or on several websites like eBay, OLX, and Quikr, which enable you to sell used items. Anyone who is interested in buying these can contact you and get the packing materials at a low cost. Sell offline: You can also consider selling these boxes to your local scrap dealer, who is commonly known as "Kabaadi wala" in India. They are readily available in almost every locality and will happily clear the boxes and other packing scraps from your home and will pay you some money in return. Recycle: You can donate the boxes to a paper factory for a junk recycling unit. Though this is the most environment-friendly option, not many in India are aware of this, and hence do not use it. Trash them: If you are completely unsure of what to do with your boxes and want to get rid of them quickly, you can simply put them in a garbage bin so that the municipal cleaners to take them away. If you have a large number of boxes, then you may have to pay the garbage cleaner some money to help you out. Considering the benefits that you will get, this surely will be a small price to pay. One important thing to remember here is that if you are someone who gets transferred very often or has to shift residences frequently, then it makes sense to retain the boxes for future use. Nowadays these boxes have become costly, and it really will help you if you can reuse these boxes instead of having to buy them frequently. In that case, you should collapse the boxes and store them safely so that you can take them out when you need them during your next move.
