To ship or not to ship?
 

Trying to put a moving budget together. I have just been quoted £5,000 for shipping goods from Devon to Fredericton and am a bit shocked! The guy explained that because its Fredericton its more expensive and you can't get half a container.

I really don't think our stuff is worth £5k! We are fairly minimist and the kids have ruined most of our furniture so am not sure what to do. Also am I right in thinking its best not to bother with electrical items - if so will have even less stuff!

Does everyone generally ship their stuff? Anyone not and regretted it? I probably have about 2 teachests full of stuff that I really care about - is there anyway you can ship a couple of boxes?

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

You could find out how much it'd be to send via a postal service. Customs details on this are here: http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/import/po...erson-eng.html

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

If you've got the time to buy new stuff when you land then that is probably the best thing to do, just bring the essentials. Think about what you need in the first few weeks and buy the rest on landing.

My experience is that you bring all the things that you don't need and leave behind all the things that you do!

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

We shipped 10 boxes of stuff that we couldn't leave behind at a cost of about 700 quid.

Don't really regret the decision. However, what I do regret is not being more savvy when setting up here and buying new things - basically spent like a drunken sailor and paid way more than we should have done for some things!

Moral of the story - set budgets for the items you'll need to replace and don't get carried away and go over them!

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

We didn't have much in the way of stuff to ship.... certainly no furniture.
Electrical goods aren't compatible and so we sold / binned them before leaving. And so we were left with sporting goods, clothes and keep sakes.

For those things we felt we simply had to keep for a practical purpose, we probably with hindsight could've just thrown them away in the UK and saved the shipping fees they incurred.

Our shippers took so long to do what they said they would do (read: took over twice as long as quoted:ohmy:) that we were forced to either do without or buy duplicates.

Now we are left looking at either two lots of the same thing (winter sports clothes for example) or wondering why we bothered keeping it at all?

Be ruthless when deciding what to bring and remember that shopping can be fun.:thumbsup:

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

We didn't bother with furniture (well apart from hubby's computer chair) we just shipped 42 boxes (we packed) for about £1500 and was from door to door in approx 6-7 weeks. No problems and the company was very quick to answer any questions

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

Really? In their current condition, you possessions may not be worth 5k (if you were to try and sell privately or at car boot sales, etc), but how much will it cost you to replace everything new?

We paid about 4,300 GBP to ship all our stuff and my god, I'm glad I did. Just buying boring stuff like mops, hoovers or lamps adds and adds till you scare yourself at just how much it costs to start over.

If your furniture really is trashed and knackered, don't ship it. If it's just a bit worn or an unfashionable colour but still in good condition, bring it - use it for a while so you don't rush out and buy something you'll regret, and then consign it your basement at a later date. :thumbup:

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

we didn't ship electricals as they have 110v here. and furniturewise we just took some sentimentals, the rest was clothes and toys. we had a split container and paid £1450 incl.insurance, packing and door to door shipping from manchester to ottawa. took 10 weeks tho as it was a london company and they took it all down to london(their ditribution center in the uk), then back up to liverpool then halifax, montreal, toronto and back to ottawa. :D
the company was called evl (european van lines) and somebody on the BE forum recommended them to us and we were quite happy with them. even had a minor loss, some wooden beam got lost and their insurance paid without any trouble.
good luck with the move :thumbsup:

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

^^^exactly this!

There seems to be a general consensus (excluding those moving to an apartment or condo in downtown TO or Van) that your house here will be bigger than your house in the UK. You'll need to furnish it - furnished rentals are few and far between - and provide all the stuff that makes a house a home. Major expentitures when you get here will likely include a car and all the appliances it genuinely is not worth bringing: maybe including a TV, washer and dryer, vacuum, lamps, stereo... the list goes on. Add beds, linen, cutlery, crockery, to the tables & chairs, couch, etc etc, to the list, and you will very soon hit that 5k price.

If you bring everything you can fit in a container you won't have to spend your first few weeks buying everything new at full retail price. Even if you want a new sofa, you can wait for the sales.

When we moved over we were on the limit of capacity for a 20' container. To play safe, we opted for a 40' container and went to a bunch of salerooms in the UK to get extra furniture to fill it with. A set of 6 Edwardian dining chairs, fairly nondescript and in need of a bit of TLC, set us back less than a hundred quid and is far nicer than anything Leon's or The Brick could provide at five times the price, let alone trying to find anything decent in the second-hand market. A couple of chests of drawers, a bedside table or two... we knew we'd be furnishing two more bedrooms than we had in our London flat.

Probably more important than any of that, though, is the familiarity of your things and the help that will be to you and your kids in settling into your new home. Moving countries is a big upheaval - anything you can do to ease the emotional burden is money well invested, IMHO.

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

We wished we had shipped much more of our stuff. I never want to replay the weekends and nights on end trying to find furniture and household supplies - something we liked for good value - trying to figure o ut what was good value and wishing we had more time to choose and wondering how on earth we were going to afford to furnish a house that was 4 times the size of the one we had and if only we had kept our bed and sofa, it would have been great for the spare room and the basement blah blah blah:eek:

Five years on and I still remember the horror of shopping those first couple of months and the expense.

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

We shipped about 20 boxes of stuff for 1300 quid. Sold / gave away everything before we came. Cost an absolute fortune to replace everything, and of course, houses are MUCH larger here (uless you live in a mansion!). We moved from 730 sqft to 3100 sqft and half the rooms are still sparse!

We don't regret it, but it does get boring having to go start out all over again and shopping for the mundane stuff like teatowels, cutlery, etc.

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

This is good topic for the search function

Its a regular discusion with many view points


Mine.. 1st trip over sold most things, bought new when arrived (Its really f*****g expensive when you add it up). When moving back to the UK took almost everything , and when we came back we brought everthing incluing the electricals (not fridge or washers etc) and then threw out what we didn't want or couldn't use this side

Also look at the Wiki so see if you can be bothered to bring things that may require effort to make them work

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

There are cheaper ways to do it, e.g. pick up your goods at the port rather than door-to-door. Rent a U-Haul truck and go to the port (I assume Halifax) and fetch them or get a local removals company to do it.

I did this once when I moved from the US to the UK, unfortunately my PC and stereo were stolen but that could have happened either way frankly. But I was shipping my car and I just got the general impression it was easier to deal with Customs myself at Felixstowe and I'm pretty certain I was right.

It is a bit disconcerting being in a freight yard moving all your stuff into a truck but I saved a lot of money.

In my case I have an enormous number of books that weigh a lot and take up huge amounts of space so just dumping it all isn't really an option.

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

By the time our stuff was listed on the Goods to follow list the value of it was much more than we originally thought. It made shipping a much cheaper option (less than 10% of the total value of stuff) and one of the bests decisions we made.

As others have said - don't underestimate the expense and time required to start completely from scratch. You will already have more than enough to sort out when you land.

Re: To ship or not to ship?
 

Hi

We wished we had brought more stuff...... we only shipped 4 boxes of clothes and personal stuff... I wish I had brought stuff like bedding and all of my kitchen equipment as these things are expensive in comparison.

We replaced our bedroom furniture, dining table/chairs and sofa, electricals and it does soon add up. We were fortunate as the lady who bought our house bought all of our stuff which gave us the budget to be able to do this.

Hope this helps:thumbsup: