paulry

I tend to agree when it comes to furniture. We brought everything, lock stock and barrel over and it was really handy over the first year or so because it was basically just like moving house with nothing to buy, and I would say it was a gentler experience to settle in since we had all our familiar "stuff", which I think especially if you have kids it helps. But ten years on and apart from a few prized pieces of furniture we've chucked everything out, and it's true, UK furniture is generally made for smaller housing so much of it looks a bit silly in a spacious home. But even having said all that I have no regrets with shipping everything over. We could have done with leaving a bit of junk behind but when everything important was in the container we found there was still a bit of space left so we threw the junk in too!

Good advice to check what the furniture costs over here to replace.

Amazulu

Agree about shipping stuff over. Not boasting, but we tend to buy quality, more expensive stuff as we want it to last - not cheap crap that you chuck away after a few years use. We're still using our UK sofas, mattress, bedding, kitchen stuff etc. All still perfectly useable (in fact, our 20+ years old Italian-made mattress is as good as new). We've also got rid of a lot of stuff too. When I was first buying properties in the UK, I bought a lot of 2nd hand stuff and most of that is now gone

paulry

My experience is we get nicer quality furniture over here - provided we stay away from places like Ikea. And I'm not adverse to getting very solidly built antique furniture from Gumtree and eBay - In fact we've got some real gems there.

When we were in the UK we always had it in mind that we would one day move to Australia so we weren't terribly fussy about the furniture quality as long as it was functional and looked reasonably okay - the idea was we would leave most of it behind but as it turned out we brought quite a bit with us. But most of that is gone now. Funny you mention about your bed mattress. Ours was reasonable quality when we bought it but after years of use including my sons using it as a trampoline when they were small it was well overdue for replacement by the time we left the UK. On the morning we left I strapped all three mattresses to the roof of our car and took them the tip, but it was quite embarrassing putting ours on the roof. The stuffing was literally coming out of the sides and there were even springs protruding from it. Yup, we squeezed every bit of value out of that one!