Hectic time good luck. I remember the same company packing us up and the Supervisor going into panic mode and kept ringing head office to say they needed more men if they were to finish on time! It was absolute chaos at the end of the day with things being packed that we just didn't want to bring over.

Good news, only a couple of breakages and the most frustrating was to find a vegetable dish with lid (one of four matching), not even wrapped but just set on top and then the box sealed - no wonder it did not survive!

Best wishes for your new life in Canada, you have picked a good area to begin.

Thanks everyone. You might tell from the time it's taken me to reply that things are hectic here.
The Whites' guys have been excellent, and very quick. Too quick at times, packing some of my mother-in-law's things before she had time to hide them, and they wrapped two wardobes which I wanted to dismantle first to save space, so I've unwrapped and dismantled them today, they take up 20% of the room now compared to when they're assembled.
Mikeypm - thanks for the offer, but finding time to breathe is proving difficult at the moment, but hopefully things will settle once the container leaves on Wednesday and there's very little packing left to be done.
Cheekymonkey - we've not found a house yet, we're looking to buy straight away, and we're in touch with a realtor in Calgary who knows what we're looking for, and we're meeting him the day after we arrive to go and view some houses. Nothing we can do about those unlucky people affected by the floods, and their impact on the housing market. We're a very laid back family really, what will be will be, we're not going to stress about something we can't control, we'll deal with what houses are on the market at the time we're looking to buy.
KAT16 - Airdrie is on the list too of places to look at for housing, so thanks for the positive review :-)

Once everything is packed up and gone, I'll try to recap on how things have been. At the moment we're halfway through, according to the stickers the Whites guys are sticking on everything, we're at over 120 boxes/bubblewrapped items and we've got the room with the most stuff in still to do - our home office. They're confident we'll fit in our container, just. We're not quite so sure, so have a list of things that will go in last, and if they don't make it in, then the British Heart Foundation charity shop will benefit :-)

Oh I remember that feeling well enough too! LOL We used Whites too and they had the contents of our three bed semi packed up in a day and a half! Happy packing and look forward to meeting you when you arrive!!

We also fly on the 7th August from Manchester. Me and my 2 children as my partner is already there, We will be living in Morinville, Alberta. Although we haven't had the joys of packing up a house, We have our worldy possessions packed into 4 suitcases (so hard to leave the shoes behind)

Our packers have just left.......empty house, fish suppers tonight

Wierdly I'm looking forward to an empty house tonight - it'll mean one big thing is off the list!
The container arrived at noon... the lads have three hours to fill it.

How exciting!!

We're just starting to look at movers (no date yet on moving but anticipating it being in November) ... how much in advance did you book them? Just thinking that we won't know until end of Sept/early Oct when we want to move, nor specifically where - is 6 weeks leaving it too late? (We really won't have that much stuff to move as we're got no furniture to speak of - just clothes, toys, one ikea poang chair I'd like to keep, and a cot, some books & cds).

http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Shipping-Canada has some useful information about shipping goods - but you should bear in mind that the the St. Lawrence Seaway closes at some point in December due to ice formation and doesn't open again until around March.

If you haven't too much stuff, have you considered sending it Air Transat Cargo? You would be suprised how reasonably priced it is and insurance is much cheaper. The only downside is that you have to collect it from the airport, but it may be worth looking into.

St Lawrence Seaway:- http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgur...ed=0CH8Q_h0wCw

Thanks for the tip on Air Transat cargo ... will go have a gander.

I did read the wiki article, thanks .. no mention of timelines though.

Would be interested to see another article built with people's experiences with specific shippers ... seems like alot of people keep asking for recommendations so might be worth one going up - maybe separated into the companies and people can add their stories with that company? I dunno - just thinking off the top of my head. Know I could use something like that lol. Thank god for the thread search tool lol

That's a really good idea having a thread for each different company

I think its been a very, very long time since the St Lawrence seaway has been closed due to ice. They have ice breakers on the seaway. They keep everything moving.

http://www.greatlakes-seaway.com/en/...ce20121115.pdf

http://northcountrynow.com/news/st-l...-dec-29-071679

l

When we were looking into which shipping company to use I started this thread and it got some useful replies:
http://britishexpats.com/forum/showt...hipping+search

somewhere there is another thread with about 20 pages of replies as well, but I can't find that one just now!

Wow - that's a helluva thread -thansk! Interestingly I've picked pretty much the same companies to get quotes from ... though we won't be shipping furniture, just boxes of stuff, so I'm hoping that means we won't run into the £000s!