The kitchen alone is twenty boxes. Two bedrooms add thirty-two, the living room thirteen, one and a half bathrooms nine, and a garage with a few shelves of tools another eight. That is 82 moving boxes for a two-bedroom house with an average amount of stuff, and it is the first of three numbers this article follows through one move.
The move is a worked example, not anyone's story. A household leaves a two-bedroom apartment where the tap water is soft and moves into a two-bedroom house with one and a half bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a sparse garage. The new utility report lists the water at 180 mg/L. And there is a vegetable bed waiting, which raises an old question: is there a right night to plant it? One calculator per stop, three stops, one bill at the end.
Stop 1: four weeks out, the box count
The usual first move is a quick chart. Redfin puts a two-bedroom home at 40 to 60 boxes, Butterfield Moving at 50 to 80. Both are averages over homes that are not this one, and they already disagree by twenty boxes at the top end. So the moving box calculator counts room by room instead, with Butterfield's own ranges for each room: kitchen 15 to 25, bedroom 12 to 20, living room 10 to 15, bathroom 4 to 8, a sparse garage 5 to 10. A half bath counts as half a bathroom.
Average stuff means the middle of every range, and the middle comes to 82. Here is the count, next to the apartment the household is leaving and the two extremes of the same house:
| Version of the move | Boxes | Room range | Small / medium / large | Packed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2-bedroom apartment, average stuff | 71 | 53 to 88 | 22 / 32 / 17 | 206 cu ft |
| 2-bedroom house, fewer things than most | 60 | 60 to 102 | 20 / 26 / 14 | 172 cu ft |
| 2-bedroom house, average stuff | 82 | 60 to 102 | 26 / 37 / 19 | 237 cu ft |
| 2-bedroom house, more things than most | 102 | 60 to 102 | 33 / 46 / 23 | 292 cu ft |
Read the third and fourth rows together. The same house swings by 42 boxes depending only on how full the closets are, which is more than the garage, the kitchen and the bathrooms put together. And the house needs eleven boxes more than the apartment it replaces, all of them from the half bath and the garage.
Sizes matter as much as the count. U-Haul's small box is 16-3/8 by 12-5/8 by 12-5/8 inches and rated for up to 65 lb, and books and canned food go first on its list; the large one, 18 by 18 by 24 inches, holds three small boxes by volume and is meant for bulky, light things such as folded clothing. That is why the kitchen in the count is half small boxes and the bedrooms are mostly medium and large. The split comes out at 26 small, 37 medium and 19 large, about 237 cu ft once packed, before a single piece of furniture.
At $2.49 a box the 82 cost $204.18. U-Haul buys back unused U-Haul boxes with the receipt, so the honest move is to buy the counted number and return the leftovers, not to stop at the chart's 50 and run out on the last evening.
Stop 2: the first week, a water report that needs translating
Water reports are written for chemists. The old apartment's report said 45 mg/L, the new house's says 180, and the softener brochure in the mailbox talks only in grains per gallon. The coffee machine, bought in Europe, wants German degrees. One number, four readers, and nobody uses the same unit.
The water hardness calculator takes the reading in any of seven units and converts it with factors derived from molar masses, so one grain per US gallon is 17.12 mg/L and one German degree 17.85 mg/L. Both addresses, side by side:
| Unit | Old apartment | New house |
|---|---|---|
| mg/L (ppm) as CaCO3, as on the reports | 45.0 | 180 |
| Grains per gallon | 2.63 | 10.52 |
| German degrees | 2.52 | 10.1 |
| French degrees | 4.50 | 18.0 |
| mmol/L | 0.45 | 1.80 |
| USGS scale | Soft | Hard |
| WQA scale | Slightly hard | Very hard |
The surprise is the last two rows. The USGS draws its lines at 60, 120 and 180 mg/L and calls the new water hard. The Water Quality Association, whose glossary the softener trade uses, draws them at 1, 3.5, 7 and 10.5 grains per gallon, and 180 mg/L is 10.52, just past its line for very hard. Same tap, two labels, and both are correct. At the old address the two scales disagreed too, soft against slightly hard, because the WQA calls water soft only below 1 gpg.
What the number means for the house
The USGS describes hardness as a property of water that is not a health concern but can be a nuisance: heated hard water leaves calcium carbonate scale that can shorten the life of a water heater and raise the cost of heating water, and soap reacts with calcium into scum, so more soap or detergent is needed. None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to know the number.
Enter a daily use and the calculator turns the reading into a load. At 150 gallons a day, a figure to replace with the gallons on your own bill divided by its days, 1,577 grains of hardness pass through the plumbing daily, 11,041 a week, about 82.2 lb a year counted as calcium carbonate. That weekly figure is what a softener has to remove between regenerations, and softener capacity is rated in exactly those grains. The pounds are not the weight of scale; only the part that settles out, mostly where water is heated, stays behind.
And the coffee machine gets 10.1, in German degrees, the unit its menu asks for. Typing 10.52 instead would be a small error, about 4 percent, and easy to make, because the two units sit so close together.
Stop 3: the first planting weekend, and the Moon
The vegetable bed is the last stop and the softest one. The Old Farmer's Almanac keeps an old tradition alive: plant crops that bear above ground, such as corn, tomatoes, watermelon and zucchini, while the Moon is waxing, between new moon and full moon; plant crops that bear below ground, such as carrots, onions and potatoes, plus bulbs and perennials, while it wanes. The Almanac is open about the evidence. It says some studies suggest a small effect and others call it folklore, and it reminds readers that soil, sunlight, water, weather and the variety influence growth considerably.
So treat it as a free choice, not a rule. If you want to follow it, the moon phase calculator answers the only question that matters for it: is the Moon waxing or waning on the evening you have free, and when does that half of the cycle end? Switch on the planting note and it gives the window directly, until the next full moon or the next new moon.
Why the time zone is part of the answer
A phase is an instant, the same for the whole planet. The date is not. The full moon in the screenshot falls at 12:11 AM Eastern time, which is 9:11 PM the evening before in Pacific time. A gardener in New York and one in Los Angeles looking at the same full moon would write different dates in their notebooks, and for a tradition built on "before the full moon" that one evening can matter. The calculator works in twelve zones with daylight saving applied, and its phase times agree with the Espenak phase catalog to within 2 minutes.
A waxing Moon is also easy to see, which makes the planting evening a pleasant one whatever you think of the tradition. NASA describes where each phase sits in the sky:
| Phase | Lit share | When it is up, per NASA |
|---|---|---|
| New moon | 0% | rises and sets with the Sun, not visible |
| Waxing crescent | up to 50% | evening sky, sets after the Sun |
| First quarter | 50% | rises around midday, sets around midnight |
| Waxing gibbous | 50 to 100% | afternoon and evening, sets before sunrise |
| Full moon | 100% | rises around sunset, sets around sunrise |
From a new moon to the next full moon is about two weeks, so about half of all evenings fall in a waxing window. For a household that just moved, that means the bed rarely has to wait long.
What the move added up to
Here is the whole project in one table, the shortcut answer next to the counted one:
| Question | Quick answer | Counted answer |
|---|---|---|
| How many boxes? | 40 to 60 or 50 to 80 from whole-home charts | 82, 60 to 102 by room |
| What do the boxes cost at $2.49? | not usually worked out | $204.18 |
| How much room do they take? | not usually worked out | about 237 cu ft before furniture |
| Is the new water hard? | a bare 180, unit unread | 10.52 gpg: hard (USGS) or very hard (WQA) |
| What would a softener face? | not usually worked out | 1,577 grains a day at 150 gallons |
| When is the planting night? | whichever weekend is free | any evening the Moon is waxing, if you follow the tradition |
None of the counted answers took long. What they changed is the size of the order, the meaning of a water report and the confidence that the planting night was a choice, not an accident.
Four things this move teaches
Count rooms, not homes
Whole-home charts disagree by twenty boxes for the same home size, and a house and an apartment with the same number of bedrooms differ by eleven in this example. The rooms are what you actually pack. Counting them takes a minute and gives a range, 60 to 102 here, instead of a single number pulled from a chart.
The garage and the half bath are rooms too
They are the two lines quick estimates forget. Here they added eight and nine boxes; a stuffed garage alone is 30 to 50 by Butterfield's figures, more than two bedrooms.
Never read a hardness number without its unit
Read as mg/L, 180 is hard water. Read as grains per gallon, it would be about 17 times the WQA line for very hard. Ask the report which unit it uses, and ask whoever sells you a softener which scale they quote.
Follow the Moon if you like, but know what it is
It costs nothing to plant on a waxing evening. It is a tradition the Almanac itself says the studies disagree on, so it should never push a planting past a good day for the soil and the weather.
If the move happened again
Two changes would do the most. First, sort before packing, not after. Moving the same house from average stuff to fewer things than most brings the count from 82 to 60 boxes, 22 fewer, which at $2.49 is $54.78 saved and about 65 cu ft less to load. Second, ask for the water report before signing anything, so the softener question is settled before the boxes are opened rather than after the first descaling. The planting night can stay exactly as it is: whenever the Moon is waxing and the weekend is free.
Tools discussed in this article
- Moving Box Calculator - moving boxes for each room you pack, from Butterfield Moving's room ranges, split into U-Haul's small, medium and large sizes, with the packed volume and the cost.
- Water Hardness Calculator - a hardness reading in gpg, ppm, German or French degrees, Clark degrees, mmol/L or mEq/L, rated on the USGS and WQA scales, with the grains a softener removes per day.
- Moon Phase Calculator - the Moon phase, lit share and age for any date in the twentieth or twenty-first century, the exact new, quarter and full moon times in your time zone, and the planting-by-the-Moon note.
Ready-made calculations from this article
Moon phase tonight in... New York, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, California, Hawaii, the UK, Sydney, India
Hardness in ppm, converted to grains per gallon: 100 ppm, 120 ppm, 150 ppm, 180 ppm, 200 ppm, 250 ppm, 300 ppm, 350 ppm, 400 ppm, 425 ppm
Is this many grains per gallon hard water? 3 gpg, 5 gpg, 7 gpg, 8 gpg, 10 gpg, 12 gpg, 15 gpg, 18 gpg, 20 gpg, 25 gpg, 30 gpg
German degrees of general hardness to ppm: 4 dGH, 5 dGH, 6 dGH, 8 dGH, 10 dGH, 12 dGH, 14 dGH, 15 dGH, 18 dGH
How many moving boxes for a... studio apartment, 1-bedroom apartment, 2-bedroom apartment, 2-bedroom house, 3-bedroom apartment, 3-bedroom house, 4-bedroom house, 5-bedroom house, kitchen, bedroom
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