Shipping furniture can be expensive
March 6, 2026
“One dollar per Pound”
That is what it recently cost me to move my thousands of pounds of stuff from Virginia to California via Interstate Van Lines, not including their gas supplement, which was tied to the market price for gasoline. The good news was that gas prices fell from the time I received their estimate and signed a contract. The bad news is that we had more and heavier stuff than they had estimated.
OK, so I thought that we had left enough books, junk furniture, and tools behind, hoping to travel lighter. Apparently not. This illustrates that shipping furniture, new from the factory, delivered from an internet purchase or even hand picked from a tag sale is an expensive, often overlooked detail. The materials to wrap and pack, the manpower to load and unload, the costs to maintain, insure and fuel the trucks are built into the purchase price. How many FREE file cabinets have you seen at the curb on trash day?
Every new piece of furniture I order for my interior design clients arrives by common carrier to a local delivery company. There they inspect it and schedule white glove delivery, (and installation if required) to the job site. Become a better steward of the environment and support your local suppliers. Use indigenous building materials and consider local sources for particularly heavy items such as glass table tops, stone coffee tables, oversized wooden case pieces, patio furniture and picture frames. Unless they are custom made or antique, buying these items locally will not compromise the resulting interior design and will reduce your carbon footprint.
Image from East End Moving.
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