It is the question everyone asks the day before they pack, and almost nobody answers well: how many boxes is this actually going to take? Guess low and you are taping together supermarket cartons at midnight. Guess high and — if you are paying by the box, as you do with door-to-door storage — you are paying for air.
There is a straightforward way to work it out, and it starts with a fact most guides skip entirely.
A box has two limits, and the one that stops you is rarely the one you expect
Our storage box measures 75 x 45 x 45 cm. That is 152 litres of space, with a 20 kg weight limit.
Those two numbers disagree with each other constantly. Fill 152 litres with books and you have packed roughly 84 kg — more than four times what the box is rated for, and considerably more than you want to lift. Fill the same box with duvets and you will reach the top with kilos to spare.
So the honest answer to "how many boxes" is: it depends entirely on what is going in them. Here is where each kind of household item actually runs out.
| What you are packing | Box fills to | Stopped by |
|---|---|---|
| Books, papers, files | About a quarter | Weight |
| Tools, hardware, cables | About a third | Weight |
| Crockery, glassware, pans | About a third | Weight |
| Kitchen dry goods, small appliances | Just under half | Weight |
| Shoes, bags, accessories | Most of it | Weight |
| Folded clothing | All of it | Volume |
| Bedding, duvets, pillows | All of it | Volume |
| Toys, cushions, soft furnishings | All of it | Volume |
Never fill a box with one dense thing. A box of books is a box you cannot lift and we cannot accept. Put books, tools and crockery in the bottom third of a box and fill the rest with clothing, towels or bedding. You get a box that is full, safe to carry, and paid for once instead of twice.
Room-by-room estimates
These assume you are storing belongings and not furniture, and that you are mixing dense and light items as described above. Treat them as a starting point, then add two.
A studio or one-bedroom flat
8 to 12 boxes. Wardrobe contents run to three or four on their own. Kitchen accounts for two or three. Books, documents and electronics take another two. Bedding and towels fill one or two.
A two-bedroom flat
15 to 20 boxes. The jump is larger than it looks, because second bedrooms accumulate the things that have no other home: sports gear, paperwork, spare bedding, boxes you never unpacked from the last move.
A seasonal swap
3 to 5 boxes. Winter coats, boots, ski gear and heavy bedding going away for the summer, or the reverse. This is the most common reason people store with us and the easiest to estimate.
A student between semesters
4 to 6 boxes. Clothes, bedding, books and kitchen basics from a room in halls or a shared flat. Books are the trap here — see the weight rule above.
An office clear-out or archive
Count your shelf metres. One linear metre of full A4 lever-arch files is roughly 12 to 14 kg, so a metre of shelving fills most of a box on weight alone. If you are storing archives rather than moving them, it is worth asking whether some of it should be securely destroyed instead of stored — you pay to keep files you no longer need to keep.
Why the box count matters more with door-to-door storage
With a self-storage unit, the box count is a packing detail. You rent a fixed room and it costs the same whether you fill it or not. With door-to-door storage you pay per box, per month, so every box you pack badly is a recurring charge rather than a one-off annoyance.
That cuts both ways, and mostly in your favour. If your things genuinely fit in six boxes, you pay for six. You are not rounding up to the nearest room size and paying for the empty half. But it does mean five minutes of thought while packing is worth real money over a year.
At €20.00 per box per month, the difference between a well-packed ten boxes and a lazily-packed fourteen is €80 a month. On a six-month store, that is nearly €500 for the sake of not putting the towels in with the books.
What does not go in a box
Some things should not be boxed at all, and trying to force them is how boxes get damaged:
- Anything liquid — it will find a way out and take the rest of the box with it.
- Framed pictures and mirrors — these want to travel flat and separately wrapped, not stacked among clothing.
- Anything perishable, including food and open toiletries.
- Documents you are storing only because you cannot face sorting them. Storage is not a filing system.
Our full list of what can and cannot go into storage is in the what you can store guide.
A quick way to check before you book
Walk each room and count in units of "one full box", using the table above to sanity-check weight. Write the number on your phone. Then add two — for the things that turn up at the back of a cupboard on the last day, which they always do.
If it turns out you need fewer boxes than you booked, that is fine: you pay for what we collect, not what you estimated.
Storagelux is a monthly service with a one-month minimum, whatever the box count. If you need somewhere to leave bags for a few hours or days, a left-luggage service is the right answer, not us.
Door-to-door storage in Luxembourg
From €20.00 per box per month, or €16.00 on six months or more. Free pickup, and we do the loading, the driving and the lifting.