Australia_bound?

Not a question on shippers but containers. Are shared containers good value?
Have been told they can take ages to arrive as shippers can't give a date of arrival...

gadgetguy

Depends how you measure it.

We decided to leave behind furniture and large electricals (fridge/freezer, washer and dryer etc) as we are renting the house out as 4 furnished rooms.

Our furniture was mainly Ikea with a couple of DFS sofas so we couldn't justify spending around £5000 when it wouldn't cost that much to replace.

Our shipping included basically all non-furniture items like clothes and linen, computer equipment, TV's and other electronics, games consoles, DVDs, some books, pictures, photos, lamps, documents etc so we only needed a part container.

This cost just over £1000 which was good value for us because replacing just one TV over here would cost nearly that much. That included packing and door to door within 30 kms of Melbourne.

As for dates, our shipper delayed collection until he could give us a date when the container would be full. At one point he even advised we might want to go elsewhere because of slow progress - pretty good service I thought. So by the time of packing/collection we knew the shipping details and dates.

Over this side, the agents have been very efficient and emailed us with the status of each stage and estimated dates for completion of each step.

This culminated with delivery yesterday. We've been through most of it and it all seems to be there and there are no breakages at all. All in all pretty painless.

Brisbane bound

We used Excess Baggage back in 2006 and had no problems at all. Guess we were lucky. It all arrived unharmed and bang on time. We had about 15 boxes.

shonaoconnor

We did exactly the same thing, and for the same reasons. When I mentioned to a friend how much the move was going to cost he asked 'have you considered taking nothing or next to nothing and buying it all from new again?'. When we added it up it made perfect sense. We sold our furniture on Ebay, so made a bit there, and saved by shipping far less.

It was a great plan apart from the fact that the Canadian High Commission told us we could expect our visas in 6 weeks and it never happened, and we ended up spending over 4 months at my mothers and spent most of the money we would have taken with us. And of course what little we did end up shipping either ended up lost or damaged thanks to Burke Bros.

mi5agent

Hi,

We were in you position about what to bring over and id virtually as you did, dumped the firniture and brought over - as you mentioned and all our art and craft studio stuff.

I think your shipper deserves a mention and may be good for other to know.

We used John mason in Liverpool after a commendation on EP- but we have had problems with lots of small thing not arriving. Some seem quite stupid really, a framed panarame of teh Louvre in Paris taken in 1997, its three photos stuck together..before computers! The frame was nothing special...but its missing! Also missing were bits and pices of computer, craft and my 4 gig camera memory cards.

We found a downside, in that IKEA Sydney is more expensive that UK IKEA, and in general DFS prices are around a third of aussie prices.

We decided more on the basis that what we had was in the main between 10 and 17 years old as we changed the last two houses in the UK.
We decided that while it was good ..it was old and maybe not suited to an aussie style house with a "family room" - for those who dont know,its open plan kitchen, diner and lounge all in one. We also have a "formal" lounge or as the Victorians ( UK ) would term it a withdrawing room. Which in hindsight would have taken out dark wood cabinets and units.
We did bring our 3 & 2 seater settee's as they cost a small fortune and were nearly new an dlook great in the new lounge.

So a factor to consider about furniture is , even if its worth bringing...will it look OK in aussie styled houses.

TV sets can be a problem, we brought a 40" Samsung LCD and a 32" Asda cheapie we used in the bedroom ( eyes not good really!) Thats now in the lounge and the 40" in teh family room, noproblems with Foxtel, but the DTV side is still hard wired to show all the UK freeview stations and I cannot find a way to get it to see the Aussie freeview stuff. I am told that older sets have a mismatch with teh sudio tuning and may need a shop technitian adjustment inside. DVD players will have that stupid region thing that will show when you bung in an aussie bought disk, least it did with us.

Anyway, hope all goes well and your shipping story turns out well.

best wishes

Fly Away

Just wanted to share some packing tips and warnings with you all. Our 40 foot container arrived 2 weeks ago. We have now gone through everything and discovered that the stuff packed by the shippers isn't in great condition and yet the stuff I packed is all fine..... draw your own conclusions.........

I originally posted some of this in another thread because Mr Mover gave me some great tips and I wanted to publicly thank him and share the info.

We have lots of antique china and I was worried about damage in the container. Mr Mover's advice was to collect old icecream tubs and pack the items myself in bubble wrap carefully inside.

I did this, (and being anal I also put a sticker on saying what was inside and while I was at it, made an inventory of all the items which I gave to the shippers and to the insurance company.) Our house was packed in January by the shippers and was taken in small van loads to a storage unit. There, it was packed into 7 large crates and put into storage. The crates were unpacked and repacked into the container in February and arrived in Adelaide in April. It spent 3 weeks going through customs and was then delivered to us. Obviously there is a great deal of double handling in this situation and the risk of damage is even higher. However. NOT ONE of my china pieces was broken. The tubs have proved very useful as we are in a rental house and will probably be moving again fairly soon, so we don't want to unpack everything. I have stacked all the tubs complete with contents on shelves in our pantry. As they are labeled, it is easy to find an item if needed. Then, when we move, they can be packed quickly and easily.

In addition to the china being packed this way. I also purchased numerous 'Really Useful' large sturdy crates with lids and packed all our paperwork and toys into these. The men who delivered our stuff remarked on how good the crates were as none of them were damaged or discoloured or melted etc. They had never seen crates which survived so well. I wish I had packed all our bedclothes, towels and clothes in these as well. As they are stackable and clear so unpacking and moving with them is easy. Unfortunately they aren't available in Aus and the boxes I bought here subsequently aren't a patch on them.

I also filled all the suitcases we weren't taking on the flight with clothes. Again clothes and bedclothes packed by the shippers were treated very badly. My cashmere coat was used to wrap a grubby light fitting and all my husbands suits need cleaning as they were just screwed up in the bottom of a box. So my tip to anyone is to pack your own clothes. I packed some of our cases in October as the house sale was due to exchange then, (it didn't GRR) and the clothes I packed are fine - hardly creased after 6 months in a case.

We have damage to quite a few books packed by the shippers, for which they had no respect at all. So I would recommend you pack your books yourself too - maybe in plastic boxes to make moving and storing in Aus easy.

My other tip is to physically attach all remote controls, wires and leads to electrical items. We packed as many of our electrical items back into their original boxes - but we didn't have all the boxes. Those items which were packed by the shippers had the leads and remotes shoved into other boxes and took us ages to find. The remotes were also damaged due to rough packing, so wrap them in bubble wrap and tape them to your items!!

Ditto flat pack furniture. We disassembled our furniture and taped all the small parts to the big parts and put all the screws into self seal bags which we taped to the main parts too. However we packed the bookcase screws/fixings into a small box which the shippers packed into another box and didn't label it. It took a week to find them!!!

DON'T let your packers have items loosely put into boxes. When we emptied our shelves for disassembley and put the items into cardboard boxes. We specifically asked the packers to repack these items as they were just loosely placed. They didn't!!! Just shoved the boxes into their own boxes and sealed them. No packing or anything. Several items were broken in this way.

Pens and small items. I went through our drawers and put all items into self seal plastic bags. These were either left in the drawers and arrived safely or were repacked into shipping boxes and arrived safely. Ditto small multipart kids toys. I packed them all in self seal bags and then in the really useful crates.

This is the web site to buy the crates;

http://www.reallyusefulproducts.co.uk/uk/

I don't work for them - honest.

Happy packing!!

mi5agent

This is all sound information - but we did similar things an dwhen the teh John mason packers came in... they re-packed everything into their own boxes. What we had in plastic storge tubs was sifted through and repacked.
We assumed they were ensuring we had not stuffed wack of white powder inside!

I cannot fault the amount of packing in teh boxes, in fact it proably added to teh total bulk of our boxes to about 30% or a £1000 portion of the fee's!
A few items in a box and a real load of screwed up paper.
Atth eother end there were still a few brakages, but having seen how containers get treated and who know what happens when neing loaded from the container in customs and the reloaded into a shippers van. in Oz

We seem to have joined the unlucky ones who had items "not arrive" in oz.
Even though there were no signs of boxes being opened and re-sealed.
its as though they left our UK house and simply disappeared!

The problems is as I have written before. If you cannot watch the packers 100%, counting boxes is a waste of time as is the "contents" list. It is simply what the packers "think" you put in and whatthey "say" they put in.
Our packing list showed 2 fishing rods. Never owned a fishing rod in the UK.
They were in fact two mobile antenna. Explanation for the "error". One packer wrapped them up and LATER, the other packer filled in the contents!

I would tell people to avoid John Mason, but we swopped from Crown to them after a real good full of praise commendation on here, so it seems to be a matter of luck !


best wishes and good luck!