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.  They are $5 per bag of 6 blankets.  Usually a 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, extra cardboard (out of the "free" box) a shoulder dolly, mattress bags, a TV box, stretch wrap, tape, & ratchet straps.

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 house.  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 you actually sprayed water on the floor, you can pull the front tires up on some boards to give the truck an angle to drain the water, and/or leave the truck back door open while you drive to your load site, to blow dry it, and/or use some towels.

You should park your truck as close as possible, and as level as possible.  This might require using the curb under one tire and/or some boards to prop up the height of some of the tires.  The backing up of the truck is the most usual time that people run into something or over something. While backing up it's a good idea 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,

It's usually 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.   It also helps to put down some rugs at the entryway to the house, and if it's raining, put some rugs at the top of the ramp in the truck to keep the truck floor from getting wet, slippery and dirty.  Clear the isle ways in the house first so you have lots of room to carry things, reducing the risk of bumping into things on the sides.   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.

The first part to load in a U-Haul truck is the cubby hole over the cab.   This is a good  area for getting rid of heavier top loader things such as air conditioners,  tool boxes, buckets of tools, heavy open top boxes, 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 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.

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.   Pick pieces that will fill in all the spaces and make the wall tight.

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).  

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 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.

Don't skimp on pad-wrapping your furniture and scratchables with moving blankets.  When your items are well pad wrapped they are far easier 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.  At the bottom of this page are links to some YouTube videos that show how to do the blanket wrapping (also called "pad-wrapping"). 

Use hand-trucks, dollies, and carrying-straps to take the weight were possible, rather than straining. You and your helpers are not used to this, and back strains can easily catch up to you on the following day if not immediately.   If you are straining, do it differently, use the right equipment, or get more help.  At the bottom of this page are links to some YouTube videos that show demonstrations on how to do this.

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.

Once you have repeated this wall building process until most all of your squareish stackable things have been used up, 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. To the sides of this tie off wall is often a good place to put things like big long rolled-up rugs, bed railings or other pole type things.  

A good place for a big sofa is on-end, leaning with it's back-side against the tie off wall, legs against the wall of the truck. The side of the up-ended sofa against the floor should be on a folded up moving blanket.  you could put a love seat opposite it, 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, cushions and such, like as shown in the picture below.  

Boxes are the best thing to put under a mattress and boxsprings tie-off-wall because they are 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 or be damaged by the frame of the boxspring.  For smaller mattresses and box springs, it may be needed to put down two 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 the heaviest boxes.  The boxes might also need to be two rows deep in order to be deep enough to act as a platform for all the mattress and boxsprings you might have.

It's always 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.  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.

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 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. 

If you run out of room, you can always 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.