“Home! I want to go hooooooome!” my 3-year-old son, David, wailed through a waterfall of tears. “Hoooome!” I rocked him back and forth in my lap, trying to figure out how to respond.

“Baba, we are home,” I finally offered, pointing around his room in our new house, which we had moved into just three days before. “Look, there’s your crocodile, your dinosaurs, your…”

“Nooooo! No, no!” he shrieked. “I want to go home!”

For any parent who has moved with young children, this is an all too familiar narrative.

It’s difficult to decide what moving company you can trust with your valuable possessions – we get that. Regardless of what company you choose, we want to provide you with a full list of questions to ask when shopping around.

When people decide to move, one of the biggest challenges is packing up the household. Whether you’ve lived somewhere for three years or 30 years, chances are good you didn’t realize you had so much stuff.

While some people opt to hire professional movers, others are more the do-it-yourself type. If that’s the case, here are some tips on being a successful do-it-yourself packer, from those of us who have made a career of packing and moving households.