Planning
Cube sheets explained: why movers measure your home in cubic feet
Every professional estimate starts with a volume count, not a room count. Here is how the numbers are built and how to check yours.
When a coordinator walks your home with a clipboard, or joins you on a video call and asks you to point the camera at the garage, they are filling in a cube sheet. It is the oldest tool in the trade and still the most useful one. Everything that follows on your estimate, truck size, crew size, hours, and on a long-distance move the price itself, comes out of that single volume number.
What a cube sheet actually is
It is a list of every article in the house with a standard volume in cubic feet beside it. A queen mattress set is 65. A three-seat sofa is 50. A double dresser is 30. A nightstand is 5. These figures are conventions the industry has used for decades, and they are close enough that two experienced coordinators surveying the same house usually land within a few percent of each other.
Add the articles, add the cartons, and you get total cube. That number then converts to weight using the standard assumption that packed household goods average about seven pounds per cubic foot. A 1,200 cubic foot home is therefore roughly 8,400 pounds.
Why cube decides the crew, not just the truck
Truck capacity is easy: a 16 ft box truck takes about 800 cubic feet, a 26 ft takes about 1,600. Crew size is the part customers underestimate. Volume translates into carries, and carries translate into hours. A rough working guide:
- Under 400 cubic feet: two movers, three to four hours. A studio or a light one bedroom.
- 400 to 800: three movers, four to six hours. A busy one bedroom or a two bedroom.
- 800 to 1,400: four movers, six to eight hours. A typical three bedroom with a garage.
- Over 1,400: four to five movers, and a serious conversation about whether this is one day or two.
Sending two movers to a 1,200 cubic foot house saves nothing. You pay a lower hourly rate for nearly twice as many hours, and everyone is exhausted by the time the fragile things come out.
The three places cube sheets go wrong
The garage
Garages are routinely half-counted or missed. A workbench, a tool chest, a mower, four bicycles and a wall of plastic bins is comfortably 200 cubic feet before anyone touches the shelving. If your survey did not include the garage, your estimate is light.
Cartons that do not exist yet
At survey time most homes are only partly packed, so the coordinator estimates carton counts. A two-bedroom home runs to roughly 78 cartons across four sizes. If you end up with 120, that is an extra 250 cubic feet nobody planned for. Tell your coordinator honestly how much you own rather than how much you intend to keep.
The things in the attic
Lofts, crawl spaces, the cupboard under the stairs and the back of the wardrobe. Open every door during the survey, including the ones you are slightly embarrassed about.
How to sanity-check your own number
Use a room-by-room estimator and count the big articles honestly, then add your cartons. If your total lands wildly below what a coordinator quoted, ask which items they counted that you did not. Nine times out of ten it is the garage, the patio set or a carton count you were optimistic about.
A cube sheet is not a sales tool. It is the mover telling you, in advance and in writing, how big your life actually is. Getting it right is the difference between a day that ends at four and a day that ends at eight.
Sample content for this demo site. Figures marked as samples are placeholders and not a quotation.
