DIY shipping- some tips needed please!
 

Hello

Is there anyone out there who is currently going down the DIY shipping route?

We are weighing up the benefits of DIY shipping to using a company to ship our goods with and would love to pick the brains of anyone who has done this / is in the process of doing this!

We're still at the planning stage and trying to choose between Melbourne and Brisbane, not sure if this would make a difference in terms of the process?

If you are up north, who have you hired your container through?

Who did you get your boxes / bubble wrap / sofa protectors from?

What paperwork is involved?

Who did you insure your goods with?

How did you find the actual packing up of the container?

Did your goods arrive in good condition?

Did you find it easy at the other end to deal with customs etc?

Is it worth it or a pain in the b****side?!

Any advice would be gratefully received!

roobush x

What paperwork is involved?

Re: DIY shipping- some tips needed please!
 

Hi Roobush;
I wish I could be more help than I'm going to be. We came back from Brisbane to Somerset in 1998 shipping stuff ourselves. I really can't remember the details and so much will have changed since then anyway. What I do remember is that we got a professional packer in to give us a 2 hour lesson on how to pack the container and rope everything securely. we found this invaluable. Bubble wrapping everything and packing was hard work, but it meant we could afford to bring everything we wanted back with us, which could not have done otherwise. Nothing was broken in the move. Doing it ourselves worked well for us. I don't remember the paperwork being a problem at either end. Hope this helps,
Deb

Re: DIY shipping- some tips needed please!
 

We did the DIY shipping route and yes it was worth it saved us some money.

The costs were :-

20ft container, 3 hours outside our house for loading (plenty of time had 4 blokes down helping and we had loaded a 3 bed semi in an hour, everything was packed prior to the container arriving), travel costs from Sheffield to Adelaide

Bubble wrap from Ebay £30

Insurance from Letton Percival £218

Doc Fee on arrival in Australia AUD$478

Quarantine attendance AUD$605

Cartage, delivery from Adelaide (we live 3 hours away from Adelaide, if delivering to Adelaide this would have been AUD$1200 less) AUD$2667

It was at least £1500 cheaper this way.

I think that we were lucky in that only 3 cheap wine glasses didn't make it.

Tips, label boxes clearly, after lots of tips in here we made sure that boxes that had things in that customs look for i.e. shoes, tools and xmas decorations were spotless. Out of 48 boxes they only opened 6.

It took 35 days from Sheffield to Adelaide, 10 days for customs to inspect then a further 10 days for the removal company to find men that "would come up north"!!!

I didn't think that it was a hassle, you just have to be organised, make sure you pack properly and read all the threads on here!

Good luck

Re: DIY shipping- some tips needed please!
 

try www.migrateglobal.co.uk we've used them both times (we ping ponged) we did the self pack first time round with no problems and saved a fortune. second time we let them do all the work and wish we hadn't!
we moved from stockport to the sunshine coast.
no drama's second time round with them but we just found it much easier to do all the paper work ourselves.
migrate global are based in manchester.

Re: DIY shipping- some tips needed please!
 

I used Migrate Global to move a load of my Dad's stuff over when he passed away. Have to say I couldn't fault them, the packing and the customer service was excellent - only let down by the importing company this end.