How to safely ship mirrors, pictures, wall plaques and other flat, fragile items through the mail

Today I am going to show you my method of safely shipping mirrors, wall plaques, picture frames and other other flat, fragile items so the arrive safely at their destination.  

Let me tell you, I have had many things break in the mail, it happens.  Whether it was due to poor packing ( I was a shipping noob, leave me alone! ) or rough handling * cough * USPS * cough *, it doesn't really matter.

For me, shipping these kinds of items has always been a challenge, boxes were never the correct size and I would always come up short on packing peanuts. I spoke to my very wise online sales mentor, aka my mother and she recommended the method that I am about to show you.  I have been using this method for a year now and I have not had a single issue or complaint about my packages.

Things that you will need:

• Box cutter
• Sharpie
• 3/4" or 1" thick styrofoam insulation sheet, I buy mine at Home Depot.                                                                             
• Stretch Wrap
• Tape 
• 19 x 24 Poly mailer
• Fragile stickers
• Something to ship

I will be packing up this vintage mediterranean wall mirror from the 60s.

The first thing you need to do is lay out your styrofoam sheet, place your mirror on the sheet and mark around your item with a 1" buffer zone.

Cut your styrofoam piece out, trace the piece you just cut out so you have two of the same size pieces.

For added protection, I cut another piece of styrofoam to fill in the gap that will form when the mirror is sandwiched between the two pieces.  This will keep the mirror from vibrating or shifting.  I just placed a piece in the mirror as an example, I would recommend filling up the entire space.

Next, wrap the entire mirror in stretch wrap ensuring that you are maintaining the 1" buffer all the way around.   I recommend lots of shrink wrap :).

Sandwich the mirror with the other piece of styrofoam and continue shrink wrapping.  I didn't want to waste all of my shrink wrap so there isn't much on there, but you get the idea.

And last but not least, cut a 19 x 24 poly bag or wrapping paper sheet and wrap it all up, attach your fragile labels, a shipping label and you are off to the post office!

I would like to put out a disclaimer that while this method works well, there is no guarantee that it will work 100% because s#*t happens.

I hope this was an informative post, give it a shot and leave me a comment on how it works out for you.

Famous Turtle OUT!

If you are not on my blog, come see my other posts at http://famousturtletreasures.blogspot.com