#3) Real standard moving blankets are 72 by 80 inches, but they are also sold as half and other smaller sizes which are near worthless, so you need to check when buying.  It's often helpful to know which direction on the blanket is longer (the 72 or 80" direction), because you often need it to be longer in a certain direction.  Usually, the short (72") direction of a "quilted" blanket is in the same direction the sewing lines run.  The long direction (80") is in the direction the zig-zags of the sewing lines point to (like arrows). However, some blanket manufactures reverse that, so once you figure out which is which for your blankets, just remember that.

On a U-Haul blanket there are no sewing lines.  These are sometimes called "skins".  You can find which is the long and short direction by holding it up hanging in your hands.  The 72 " direction will come up to near the top of your head, as 72" equals 6 feet.  The 80" direction (6'8") will come eight inches higher than that.  

#4)  Moving blankets come in very different thicknesses and weights.  Professional quilted cotton moving blankets are much heavier, thicker, and stiffer than U-Haul blankets, and so do protect furniture much better, and they look much better, but they cost about four times as much, take up twice the space of U-Haul blankets, and are not quite as flexible or easy to use, which makes it just a preference choice of which is better for a particular mover's priorities, quickness & space, or quality.  Heavy blankets do however look far better, please customer's more, and reduce damage number averages by a few percent.  A good compromise is to have some of both types to provide the choice for different items.

The customer's assessment of the service they are receiving is a PERCEPTION.  If they perceive your crew is just some guys carrying furniture, the worth of guys carrying furniture is minimum wage.  If your service is perceived as well trained certified professionals providing over-the-top service with trick professional equipment, your value is perceived as a doctor or dentist.   The most blatant neon-sign banner-flag clue to the customer as to which category your service fits in is the equipment you bring into their house, which is the door cover, the door jam cover, and your moving blankets on their furniture.  Go back and look again at the last six picture comparisons.  The nicer thicker fabric makes things look satisfyingly more protected, and your service perceived as much more professional and valuable.  That's why all big professional companies use professional moving blankets (besides the damage reduction). It makes them money.  

#5) THE CLEAN SIDE

The "clean" side of a quilted moving blanket is the lighter colored side.  The clean side of a U-Haul moving blanket is the side with the writing/printing on it.  Moving blankets are best used by always putting only the "clean" side against furniture, and the "dirty" side outwards away from the furniture.   This way it is only the dirty side that will ever touch the floor and pick up debris.  That will keep them far cleaner where it matters.  You should also try to keep the blankets as clean as possible, especially the "clean" side, so you should try to not walk on the blankets, and you should be mindful of where you put them down, preferably not on pavement.   This is also why moving blankets should always be folded with the clean side inwards, "dirty" side outwards.

#7) It's good to first learn how to pad wrap with tape securing the blankets before learning with rubber bands, because tape will work for all jobs, all one way loads going out of town (where you wouldn't get your bands back), and all in-town jobs.  But once you've mastered securing blankets with tape, there are advantages to learning how to do it with rubber bands for all your in-town jobs where you would get your bands back.  Those advantages are mainly that bands are cheaper to use, much faster to take off, more professional looking, less wasteful, and don't need to be re-ordered all the time like tape.

#8) I've found that I like using the largest and the smallest stretch wrap, but not the in-between sizes.  When covering large areas, the large stretch-wrap is most effecient time-wise.  When needing to hold a small area together the small "lollipop" (6") size is easiest and less wasteful.  It's sometimes easier to walk backwards when rolling out the stretch-wrap around a piece of furniture, but it can be done walking forwards.  

I've found that by pointing all my fingers in the same direction like five daggers, and poking my fingers into pulled tight stretch wrap, I can perforate a line where I want the wrap to tear, and make it far easier to then pull apart at the perforation.  

#9)  Green wrap is for holding drawers in, holding blankets on furniture, and for keeping fabric clean.  Green wrap is not for protecting wood or finished surfaces from scratches or rubs.  You can put a fingernail mark right through plastic wrap.  Blankets are for protecting against scratches and rubs, and only in a small way for protecting other fabric from getting dirty, because blankets can transfer dirt, particularly used old U-Haul blankets.   That means, if a fabric is on the lighter/whiter/nice side, it should be getting either stretch wrap or a plastic cover of some kind, and then possibly blanketed.   Wood gets blanketing, while white or light fabric gets plastic wrap.  That's unless you're doing an "economy job", or unless you have very clean cotton quilted professional blankets (and not used many times U-Haul felt blankets).  Do not stretch wrap Leather or vinyl directly.  

14) COVERING UNDER THE LEGS

Many movers think of pad wrapping as something to protect the furniture and walls of the house.  But another key thing to protect is the CARPET at the unload house.  You do this by making sure your pad wrap job goes under the legs, to prevent those leg bottoms from rubbing on the aluminum (or otherwise filthy surface) floor of the truck and picking up major marking material that would otherwise be rubbed onto the nice carpets of the customer's unload house.  Aluminum rubs off. The lines you see on the carpet in this picture are filthy smudges that were difficult to get off the customer's carpet.  Imagine how much grime a leg bottom felt pad picks up rubbing on the truck floor.

Besides protecting the customer's house walls and door from being damaged by legs, another main reason to bring your padding all the way under and around the legs is to protect the legs themselves, or bottom of the item, from being damaged by being slid sideways on the floor of the truck. 

#15) You can hold the blankets on with tape, or stretch-wrap, or a combination of both.  For certain furniture items it's best to use all tape  For other items, just tape doesn't hold on as well, and doesn't allow you to grip the furniture item sufficiently, and so stretch wrapping needs to be added.  So, you can use a little tape to hold the blanketing on just good enough to do the stretch wrapping.  Or, in some cases you can skip the tape entirely and only stretch wrap.   There's also the option to skip the pad-wrapping in the house, and instead bring the item out bare, and just droop the blanket over just enough to cover contact areas.

#16) THE THREE CATEGORIES OF QUALITY

 You should think of pad-wrapping options in three general categories of quality. One is a "extra cheap and fast" being the priority for in-town low-value items, and that's where you'd be carrying most items out to the truck bare, and droop a blanket.  Category two is a priority of moderate speed balanced with moderate protection, for most in-town moves, and that's where for most things you'd tape or band the blankets in place.  Category three is for high value or long distance moves, where high quality and safety is the big priority, and that's pad and wrap in stretch-wrap most things.  The Lead should be getting a feel for which category the customer wants, and conveying that category to the crew.  Sometimes individual items will be identified as "high priority". These options will also be discussed individually for each furniture item type.

#17) WHERE TO PAD WRAP

It's usually better to pad wrap in the house, unless you're going to "droop" blanket something in place in the truck, and/or if the customer is just wanting a speed-job with low priority on avoiding damage, and/or you don't have enough blankets.  Part of the purpose of pad-wrapping is to protect both the load house and the unload house, not just protect the furniture. So doing the padding in the truck looses the benefit of protecting the houses. Not doing the padding in the house (doing it in the truck) also looses you the credit you would get for the customer seeing you doing a great pad wrapping job. 

#18)  GET CREDIT

In fact, imagine that you're a customer who sees a mover walk out of the house with a bare dining chair carrying it towards the truck, and comes back three minutes later.  You'd suspect that the mover was wasting time for two of those three minutes, since it would take only 60 seconds to carry the chair out and come back.   But now imagine you're a customer who sees the same mover pad wrap a chair nicely in two minutes, and spends only 30 seconds to run it out to the truck, and 30 seconds later you see that mover again grabbing his next piece of furniture.  You'd be impressed with this mover's hard work.  Both ways did the same amount of work, but looked very different in the customer's eyes.  

#20) Another reason you may want to pad wrap in the truck is because for some items,  if your item is padded but not stretch wrapped, it's harder to carry, harder to see what you need to see, and blanketing without the stretch wrap would make the grip more difficult.  But that's only if it's not PAD-WRAPPED.  Once you wrap the stretch wrap properly over the blanketing, the plastic adds a grip sometimes superior to what you'd have without any blanketing at all.  So keep this in mind when you balance the importance of time-savings & visibility vs. better-protection when deciding to pad wrap something in the house or truck.

#26)  Before pad-wrapping any sofa, the sofa needs to be assessed as to whether it would fit out the door with all the cushions left on under the pad-wrapping.  If it wouldn't fit, or is too close to be sure, the sofa can have considerable reduction of key dimensions by taking off the cushions and/or legs, and getting it out the door first, before pad-wrapping it in the truck or garage.  

#27)  If you do take the legs off, make sure to label the box they are going into "SOFA LEGS".   

#28)   If it's a "hide-a-bed", before pad-wrapping, remember to secure the spring-out mechanism by tipping the hide-a-bed on it's back, and zip tying together the two correct metal bars underneath.

#35) The FOUR SIDES method has the advantage of creating a no-fold, no crease and no-bunching of blanking on both ends, which could otherwise deform the fabric on the end that the sofa stands on in the truck when tipped up on end, especially if that fabric is leather or vinyl.  This method is also the simplest to get right and consistent as far as how the blanket is laid down and where all the flaps go.  It's also better looking than all but the sofa cover method, because it doesn't look like a bunch of blankets pieced together.  For these reasons, when combined with the STRETCH AND ROLL method of stretch wrapping, this should be the default method of pad-wrapping a sofa, other than when you have the opportunity to use a professional thick cotton sofa cover, which is super fast and very impressive looking.   There are however, many other ways of padding and stretch-wrapping a sofa, and they will be covered in a more advanced course, but more for the reason to demonstrate why the four-sides method is better rather than to explain better options. 

#51) Note how on a number of items he taped the upper end just enough to hold the blanket in place, he stretch wrapped the upper end, then flipped the item upside down, taped just enough to hold again, and stretch wrapped the other end with him still standing up.  He rarely needed to bend over and used minimal tape, and no bands.  Also notice which items he stretch wrapped and which ones he didn't.  the heavier ones he did, the lighter stuff he didn't.  By doing so in this way this made it the easiest possible to then grip, carry and load these items.  This was an ACE job, worth re-watching many times and learning every little detail until you can do it exactly like this.  

#54) Blink and you'll miss it in this video, but this ACE didn't carry the lamp out and dump it in the loader's lap. He got the right size box, took the lamp shade and lamp harp off, put the base in a box with a pillow stuffed around and over it, then put the lamp shade in, form fitted over the pillow which locked it all in place.  He wrote on the box "Master bedroom lamp". It's only a box being carried out to the truck, so now the loader knows to stick the box in the load up higher somewhere, and the unloader knows which room that box is supposed to go to.  No chance for lamp damage and a big time savings (and hassle savings) for the truck loader.

#59) If pictures are too big to be bubble wrapped and lined up frame-to-frame, indescending size order, and fit in a group in a regular moving box, there are several other options of how to "box", pad or otherwise protect a large picture for moving.  But first, you should know that the only way to be 99.99% sure there's not going to be damage moving a large picture is if you put the large picture in foam corners, into a picture box, similar as you would do for a TV.   That's because the foam corners create an inch air gap between the picture glass and the cardboard box which could otherwise bend in and press against the glass, even if there's bubble wrap on the glass.

#60) For this reason, for large pictures, the Lead needs to either just accept the responsibility for paying for damage and do it the quick and easy way (pad wrapping them), or ASK the customer if they would rather have their pictures done the full protection expensive way with picture boxes and foam corners, or the middle ground way putting them in picture boxes with bubble wrap, or the cheapest way, which is to just wrap them in moving blankets and tuck them in somewhere.  That question would need to be accompanies with the explanation that if they choose any short-cut less expensive way to move pictures, the customer would need to accept liability for damages to those pictures. 

#61)   One or the other; either accept liability for damages, or let the customer decide if they want to take that risk.   However, it is not your right to just accept liability for picture damage without first establishing with the customer that there are no "very high expense" (over $500) pictures you are moving.   If a picture is that valuable, you must get a liability disclaimer if you're not going to foam-corner it, or you are not allowed to move it.

#62) As long as I have established with the customer that there are no "high-expense" pictures being moved, I don't bother with the disclaimer, I just move them the easy and cheap way and accept the small risk of me paying for the damage.   DON'T DO THIS though for high value pictures, consider it not allowed.

#65)  Don't use the regular tape that is used for pad wrapping, when you are working on boxing up pictures.  Use the brown paper packing tape because it doesn't come off cardboard like the pad-wrapping plastic tape can.

#99) It's common for whoever packed the job to miss a collection of medium sized "garage-type" long things that would transport much better if collected into an extra large box like a wardrobe box.

For this reason, it's a good idea for the Lead to have an extra large box or wardrobe box on hand for just such a purpose.  These types of boxes are usually left open topped, and put as a top loader or put near the end of the load.