We are moving to Calgary soon. My husband starts his new job on Oct 6th and will come over a couple of weeks before to find a place to rent. Once he has done that I will have everything packed and shipped. My question is can we inventory our household goods room by room before they are packed or do we have to inventory them box by box? Any help, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I think you have to do it box by box.

I was afraid of that. It would be so much easier the other way instead of trying to keep track of what is going in where. Thanks for the info.

I did it box by box but didn't state everything individually. For example has bought a couple boxes DVD's and just stated DVD's did not name each DVD, same for clothes just stated clothes, shoes etc.

Although Silverdragon102 has answered your question, I recommend that you read the Wiki article called Goods To Follow-Canada. There is other information about this issue that would be useful for you to know.
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Thank you for the info everyone. I am sure I will be having many more questions before this is all over.

Judy - re the GTF WIKI article, love the Red highlighted text followed by the Green highlighted text saying the exact same thing...both effective and amusing.

1chumly - we inventoried room to room, not box to box and it was just fine. The key thing is to be reasonably accurate and don't ship anything you haven't included. To be honest, the chances of the detail of the form being looked at are remote. The shipping company, when producing their own inventory of goods they packed, approached it in a box to box method.

If it would help, feel free to PM us with an email address and we'll pop you across a copy of our actual form we put together and you can get a real life example of one that worked out OK. Having said that, the WIKI article is great and will also address your needs.

Kind regards,

Eamonn & Janet.
PS: Our blog link below will give you a little reminder of some of the good reasons for heading out this way. We're based in Okotoks, just south of Calgary.

Ive been doing it box by box and like your previous reply just putting on the side pictures/toys/clothes etc. hope that will be ok as we are moving next year and trying to get some order now. Its impossible and seems like an enormous task but im sure it will all come right in the end

Sure, we did some of that too. We had been slowly sorting through stuff and boxing things up we didn't envisage needing before we moved to Canada. We popped these in the loft and when it came to doing the Goods To Follow, we just treated it like any other room, except we would say, "box of LPs", "box of CDs" etc.

We also put things in the loft that we knew we would NOT take to Canada and when the Spring came (we were doing some of this in winter) we grabbed those boxes down and did a few car boot sales, which was a reasonable amount of fun and raised a few hundred quid. Still amazed what people will buy!

Eamonn & Janet.

As our shipping company was doing the packing, I kept my own list of what was in each box so I could cross ref. it with their list. Waste of time.

While my list had not every item, but a good indication of what each box contained, the shipping companies list was just- Kitchen x 6, personal items x 8, bedding x5, even though some boxes had cd's, books, shoes and perhaps some pillows on top! Their list was very vague!

And then to top it all, after spending a few hours filling out the Goods to Follow form for Canadian Customs, we were told by two separate customs officers we didn't need a list of goods to follow as we are on a TWP. We still haven't got our GTF forms stamped! Everyone else we know who arrived on TWP had them stamped!

Ours goods arrive in a week or two, so we will find out then!

We also didn't get our GTF list signed and stamped and panicked when we saw the release form from company asking for it, spoke to them and just asked for a letter explaining and had no problems