COURSE #2, LESSON #1

ALL MOVERS NEED TO KNOW HOW TO LOAD A TRUCK

Even if you're not the mover that's going to be putting things into the load-walls, a good helper needs to know how to load too, because knowing how to load is required in order for a helper to know which things should be brought to the truck at the right time, and how to best help the loader.  So all movers should know the material on this page, regardless of their position.

GET WHAT YOU NEED BEFORE GOING TO A JOB

If you don't have the tools you need to load a truck properly, no matter your skill at loading a truck, a top notch job can not be done.   So the first step in loading a truck properly is to make sure you first have the equipment, supplies & truck you need to do a professional job.  

If you are picking up a U-Haul truck, if your crew doesn't already have plenty of moving blankets, make sure to rent plenty of them along with your truck while you're already at the U-Haul facility.  They are $5 per bag of 6 blankets.  Usually a top-notch well done job needs about two dozen blankets per room of the house.   When you pick up the truck is also a good time to get any equipment or supplies you still need such as a hand-truck, TV box, extra cardboard (out of the "free" box) a shoulder dolly, mattress bags, stretch wrap, tape, & ratchet straps.  Whoever pics up the truck should also photo-document the gas level, odometer & U-Haul contract before driving the truck out of the U-Haul lot.

Before you start loading you should consider sweeping out or leaf-blowing your truck floor to help prevent as much dirt as possible from being transferred onto the floors of your house.   Sometimes the ramp is filthy, and if so, spray if off with a hose, or a lot of dirt can be tracked into the customer's house (& over your rugs & runners).  The U-Haul on Franklin blvd has a hot water hose you can use, situated right next to where your truck will be waiting for pick up.  

If the truck floor is filthy you can use the Franklin Uhaul water hose to spray the truck floor, & use their squeegee to push the water back out, and then leave the truck back door open while you drive to your load site, to blow dry it, and/or use some towels.  This is a part of truck loading skill because it can help keep your blankets clean, and help keep the customer's boxes & furniture leg bottoms clean, which helps you not have to deal with dirty carpet complaints. If you do this truck cleaning, you should take a picture of it and show the customer later in your "slide show" (explained later) so the customer knows you took this effort to help keep their carpets clean. This counts for a lot with customers.  This is part of what seperates the ACE movers from the rest of the pack.

If you're not picking up a U-haul, but instead picking up another truck, you need to make sure all these same things are taken care of, preferably the day before your moving job.  If and when you pick up (or borrow) someone else's truck, you need to take phone pictures of exactly what all gas and equipment is there, and text the pictures to AGMC, to prove what was and what wasn't there when you picked up the truck.  You'd need to do the same when dropping off the truck.

WHEN FIRST ARIVING AT THE CUSTOMER'S

When first arriving at the customer's house you should clock in with AGMC, by texting a "c" to AGMC (standing for "at Customer's location").  While you are texting AGMC you can give your crew a little time to situate themselves behind your truck so they can be warning spotters to help the driver back up.  

Park your truck as close as possible, and as level as possible.   This might end up requiring using the curb under one tire and/or some boards to prop up the height of some of the tires.   Do you have some "tire raiser" boards?  But you don't need to get it perfect right away.  If it's going to take any time, just park the truck temporarily, do your walk-thru, then come back out & take the longer time to get it exactly right.  You can't load a truck right if the truck floor is at a crazy angle.

BACKING SPOTTERS

The backing up of the truck is the most usual time that people run into something or over something causing damage. While backing up it should be considered mandatory for the driver to roll his window down and to have someone behind the truck watching and ready to shout "STOP", and someone watching the passenger side, especially if the front of the truck is going to swing to the passenger side when backing up.  Beware of what's on the ground as well as overhangs. 

If a helper is not behind the truck helping be a warning spotter watching the most dangerous impact corners of the truck as the truck backs up at this time, THIS MOVING CREW SUCKS BAD, no matter what other skills they have.   This crew is not worth working with.  

Yes that's a picture of our truck running into that house.  And yes AGMC will not work with movers that don't use spotters when backing up the truck.

THE WALK THRU

You should do a walk-through with the customer and the whole crew together, and do so first thing after arriving, right after parking the truck in the first apparent guessed position.  The truck can be re-situated into a better spot later if needed.  You only need to approach the customer's front door with a couple rugs, some super sticky notes, and maybe a note pad & pen to take notes.  All the other house prep can be done after the walk thru. 

During the walk thru of both the load house and delivery house, it is critical for the entire crew to be looking for, pointing out, and documenting pre-existing floor damage, so the crew isn't blamed for it later.  One scratch could cost thousands to repair, possibly needing to replace the whole floor.  If the Lead isn't hearing the crew point out floor scratches (& damage), the Lead needs to correct that major liability problem. 

 During the walk-thru the helpers should be letting the Lead do the talking and question asking, and the helpers should not be holding side conversations, not even for second.  All attention should be on the customer and the customer's words.

When does the job of "truck loading" start? Besides all the equipment and prep, the truck loading starts during the walk-thru, when you should be memorizing the sizes and locations of the different pieces of furniture in the house, so when you need a piece of a certain size you'd already know right where to go to get it, instead of walking and looking through the whole house again and again for each piece you need. That would about double the time it takes to bring the right pieces out to the truck.  

If you have the locations of furniture memorized, that also cuts the time needed for unloading way back, because if you've memorized the pieces that go into each room, you'd already know which pieces go into the corresponding rooms at the unload house, and not have to keep asking and checking about every item.

If you think the job of loading doesn't include the job of memorizing during the walk-thru, and instead think the loading job starts AFTER the walk-thru you are not a good mover.

TRUCK & HOUSE PREP

After the walk-thru, you should prep the house and the truck before starting to load the truck.

It's a good idea to use a leaf-blower to clean off the path from the truck to the house, to further reduce the amount of dirt that's tracked in.  When putting rugs down, put them down in order of dirtiest outiste to cleanest inside.  And if its wet outside, wipe your feet when you come in.   When you do all of these things together, they not only help keep the house and truck floor clean and dry, they help keep the rugs and runners clean and so can greatly reduce the frequency they need to be cleaned.  

Clear the isle ways and cluttered areas in the house first so you have lots of room to carry things, reducing the risk of bumping into things on the sides.   Accidents usually happen because you did not take the prudent precautions.

STARTING TO LOAD THE TRUCK

THE MOM'S ATTIC

After the truck and house are prepped, and after you've memorized the house contents, the first part to load in a U-Haul truck is the cubby hole over the cab, also called the "Mom's Attic" by U-Haul.   This is a good area for getting rid of heavier top loader things that are too heavy for normal top loader, and aren't good for stacking on, such as air conditioners,  tool boxes, buckets of tools, heavy open top boxes, a generator, expensive speakers, or a big fat old style TV.  If there's not much heavy top loader, dining chairs or a bunch of wall hanging pictures could go in the mom's attic.  Before starting to load, check with the Lead Loader to verify which group of items he has chosen for the strategy of filling the mom's attic.  

It's also an option for the lower half of the Mom's attic to be square more-stackable heavy things,  with a layer above it of less stackable things on top of it.  Keep an eye on trying to choose things that will fill up to the edge of the Mom's attic but not beyond that edge.  It makes it much easier to have a short step ladder on hand.

STAGING

As you or your helpers bring things into the truck, stage the items to the sides inside the truck, no closer than about seven feet back from the load-wall you're working on.  As you build more load-walls the wall fronts keep progressing back towards the back door, and if the staged items aren't  placed far enough away from where you're working, they get in the way and you might have to move them again just to make room to work. 

These staged items also need to be "like on like", meaning the same size boxes on the same size boxes, etc.  This is so that the loader does not need to move one item to get to another item beneath it. One thing should not be leaning on another thing, for the same reason.  If the staged items start getting not well staged, the helpers should help resituate the staging.  If the truck get's too full of staged items, the helpers should switch to either helping hand the load-wall builder things (particularly top loader when the lead is up on a ladder), or prepping more things in the house.

After the mom's attic, you would then build a series of "walls" like the cut slices of a loaf of bread.   Each wall reaches across the truck and up to the ceiling (like a wall), trying to keep the front edge of the wall as flat and even with the rest of the wall as possible.  Most walls will have a depth similar to the depth of a dresser or desk, or a medium sized moving box, but some walls may be the depth of a sofa or refrigerator.   

Most walls should, where possible, be composed of four height layers; 1) "base", weight bearing furniture (like  a dresser and a night stand) across the bottom (all pad-wrapped in blankets); 2) a layer of "heavier boxes" across the top of the base; 3) "lighter boxes" on top of the heavier box row; and 4) "top loader", on the very top , meaning not-very-stackable things like open top boxes, baskets, guitars, big kids toys, a vacuum cleaner, and dining chairs.  

Note that in the last picture, the dresser on the right is pad-wrapped with the wrong side of the blanket facing out, meaning the dirty (grit covered) side against the dresser.  Even if you get away with no damage on the current item, you're causing a potential damage problem for the next mover that uses that blanket. Don't do that.

Pick pieces that will fill in all the spaces and make the wall tight laterally, so that there's no slop (or empty gap) side to side.  Even a few inches of empty space of a gap can allow the wall to bang around and crush down more easily.  Tight means snug, so things can't move, with no empty space.  See the previous and following pictures.  

LOAD-WALL PICS

The Lead is supposed to be taking and texting to texting to AGMC pictures of each of your load walls for a number of critical reasons.  Moving company Insurance is void without these pictures, and so you and your whole crew would lose lots of work without these pictures. That's more than enough of a reason to take these pictures all by itself. But these pictures also allow others to know whether or not you know what your doing, and so get you more future jobs. They protect against the customer claiming that you didn't utilize the space properly or load the truck properly.  

PAD-WRAPPING

Don't skimp on pad-wrapping your furniture unless you can guess that the customers don't care about their furniture nearly as much as a quick cheap job.  When your items are well pad wrapped they are far easier and safer to load in a sufficient way, and the few extra minutes it takes to do the padding is well worth the benefit of avoiding all the damage and soiled fabric that there is a big risk of happening otherwise.  

CONTINUE YOUR LOAD-WALLS

Sometimes, two things can be put in front of each other to add up to the desired depth of the wall, or an occasional thing can have it's front placed even with the front of the wall without the back of it being the full depth of the wall (but only with a few things here and there).  Save some of your extra narrow boxes to use as "tools" to fill in small gaps and make your load tight.  Don't just load and get rid of all the extra narrow boxes becasue a good loader saves some of them as tools to use later.

Boxes are better to go on the top of base items, rather than putting tubs or anything else on base items, because the cardboard of cardboard boxes is not as hard as most other things and is a better protection for the tops of the base pieces of furniture.  Most of your load-walls should be looking like these last several examples.

The washer and dryer should have lighter items put on top of it all the way up to the ceiling, to reduce the weight on the washer & dryer.  Directly on the top of the washer and dryer should preferably be a large cardboard box that covers the entire top of each unit, from edge to edge, or over both units all the way to the outside edges, so that the edges take the weight.  This is so that the edges of the washer & dryer are holding the weight, not the area between the outside edges which can bend down.

TV'S

Do not load TV's not in a TV box, unless you advise the customer that there is a real risk of messing up the TV, and the customer accepts full responsibility for any problems with the TV.  The effect of the TV box is not that there's a box around the TV, but that the foam spacers create a gap in front of the TV screen so no pressure from the box reaches the TV screen.   The Lead should be bringing his own TV boxes to jobs for re-use on TV's.

THE TIE-OFF WALL

Once you have repeated this wall building process until most all of your squareish stackable things have been used up, and you have a nice flat load wall, you follow that with a "tie off wall", which is something like a mattress and box spring placed on a row of medium boxes (or any things of the same height) on the floor, and then tied off (or ratchet strapped) to hold it firmly in place. 

The mattress should go aginst the previous wall, followed by the box-springs on the outside, with the soft side of the box-springs facing out.  This is because the mattress conforms to the irregular bumps of the load better, and the good side of the box springs makes for a much more optimal surface to protect and go against following items such as the back side of a sofa.

 You could even line up two or three sets of mats & box-springs all together, on a couple rows of boxes.

Mattress and box-springs are the best thing to make  tie-off-wall out of because they are wide and flat and much softer than a piece of hard furniture that could press into and deform the back of a sofa that's leaning against it.   It's definitely better to use ratchet straps to hold a tie off wall, because they're flatter, stronger, they don't stretch, and they don't dig into the wall item nearly as bad as rope.

For smaller mattresses and box springs, it may be needed to put down rows of boxes underneath, to raise the box spring & mattress high enough to hold back the top loader behind it near the ceiling.  The boxes being on the floor like this is also the best place for extra heavy boxes.  You might need these boxes for this purpose, so if you do, don't use up all the boxes in the previous load walls, save some.

  Note that the previous picture of a tie-off wall has the box-springs with the under side facing out, which puts the much more damaging side (with staples & poky parts) against whatever follows such as the back side of a leather sofa, which you SHOULD NOT DO.   The soft flat top of the box-springs should face the outside, to provide the optimal protective surface against the back side of a sofa.   

RATCHET STRAPS

The rope or ratchet strap should never go straight across to the railing, but rather needs to go behind the plane of the wall, pulling the load-wall towards the front of the truck, with the strap going around the rub-railing knob, and then heading to the back end of the truck as shown in this last picture.  This prevents the railing from being pulled straight across the truck which can break the rub railing, and instead pulls the pressure parellel to to the wall which is the direction that the railing can handle ten times as much pressure.  Remember that the amount of pressure on the railing multiplies many times when under the load of the truck jerking & going up a steep hill, and that the "strait across" tie down method CAN AND DOES BREAK RAILINGS.

This method also puts the metal ratchet against the wall, behind and out of the way of the railing, instead of out on the load-wall where it could damage things.  The location the hook goes around the rub-railing knob is way out in front of the load-wall being the easiest possible to reach and hook the line around.

As the last part of this training session #6, each crewman should show a demonstration of this ratchet strap securing method to the other crewmen, and text a picture of their demonstration to AGMC.

AFTER THE TIE OFF WALL

A good place for a big sofa is on-end, leaning with it's back-side against the tie off wall (a mattress or box-springs), legs against the wall of the truck.   Sofas should be pad-wrapped, unless the condition of the sofas is a low priority for the customer, compared to their priority of speed & cost.  Note that the weight of the sofa on the left (in the last picture) is put on the frame via some folded blankets, rather than on the arm of the sofa, which might deform it.

If the customer's priority is speed & cost, with a low priority of the condition of the sofas, then you could skip the pre-pad-wrapping, and instead carry a sofa straight out to the truck.  In this case, the side of the up-ended sofa that's against the floor should be put on a moving blanket so that it never touches the floor.  

It's usually better to pad-wrap your sofas, but if you choose the right items to go around them you can probably get away with not pad wrapping your sofas, if it's not a "high end" job.  Or you can drape some blankets around them after the sofas are loaded.  We are talking "non professional" just doing the best you can with time-conservation in mind, so given the difficulty of dealing with all the blanketing you can just get the sofas loaded, and understand there is an increased risk of dirt and damage.

you could put a love seat opposite the sofa, and a refrigerator standing up between them.  Then the rest of the empty space of that load-wall could be filled with lighter boxes, like wardrobe boxes, and cushions and such.  The seat of the on-end sofa is good place to slip in a coffie table sized slab of glass, protected between the cushions and the sofa seat bottom.

SWITCHING TO GARAGE & OUTSIDE STUFF

After the extra deep load-wall of your sofas (and refrigerator or such), after you've well protected your exposed sofa areas with blanketing and cardboard, your walls can become increasingly shorter, and shift towards garage and outside stuff like a table saw, patio furniture, lawnmower, planter pots and the barbecue.  Here it's important to stack everything up tight so there's no room to shift around.  An extra tie-off at this point also can help reduce the risk of damage. 

FLAT LOADS

Sometimes there's not nearly enough furniture or items to need to stack those items upwards, and instead you could just set everything on the floor.  Some movers call this a "flat load".  When this is the case, things should be set into the load in the order of tallest in front to shortest on the back (rear) end of the truck, so that each following item helps hold back the item before it.  This means in descending order, height-wise.   This will also make it easier to tie off the load.  Don't go from tall to short, then back to tall again.  Also, one of the most common mistakes in these scenarios is to decide to "spread out" too early, not stacking what could be easily stacked, and then running short on space.   

Unless you are overly positive that you are going to have a lot of unused truck floor space, you want to still stack what's easy to stack because there so often more to go in than it originally looks like, or it takes up more room than is first apparent. 

Maybe the customer adds more items later to be loded than they originally told you about, which happens all the time.    Your insurance to be ready to handle that extra stuff is to still stack some to conserve space even though you don't need to, so you are aiming at have a good bit of floor space left over.  Don't cut it close.

STRAPPING THINGS TO THE BACK DOOR

If you run out of room, you can possibly pick something big to strap onto the back of the truck.  You can actually leave the ramp sticking out a bit to act as a ledge or a holding platform.  Here is shown a huge picnic table, but we've also done a huge chicken coop, a barbeque, a shed and a sauna.  We've even strapped a trampoline onto the side of the truck.  Just make sure to strap anything on extra secure, and then add several more straps beyond that.