In 2009 I shipped a 20 ft container full off all kinds of stuff, including a farm tractor and a mower, all the furniture we wanted to keep, books, and anything else we could fit in, I bought the container for £1000, shipped it to Halifax for £1500 and got it delivered to my place for $350. There are some on here that will say that is not possible now, but if you shop around you can still buy a 20ft SEAWORTHY containter for less than £1200.

Hi,
I would also recommend shipping everything you can over as we have found furniture here very expensive. If you want to price out some stuff go to the leon's website as they are one of the main furniture places here in Fredericton - there are others but most are more expensive. Things like bedding etc is also expensive - cheaper to drive down to the states and buy it there though.

We had a cheap argos king bed back in the UK and didn't ship it over as we thought it might fall apart but we wish we had taken the risk and shipped it as we ended up sleeping on our sofa bed for the first while when we got here until we could afford a bed

We packed all our stuff back home ourselves and the shipping company just picked it up and shipped it to us, saved a couple of thousand packing it ourselves!!

Sinead

I'm glad I found this thread The in-laws were up a couple of weeks ago and we got onto the subject of shipping if our application was successful. The advice we had gotten from someone we met on our recce was to pay for a container and then fill with as much as we could bring. My FIL was in removals though and asked why we would do that since most of our furniture is quite old and we would be looking to replace it when we got there anyway. His advice was to sell the big things like sofa, TV, beds etc and bring only the little things like crockery, cutlery, toys etc and that we could perhaps use the postal service to bring those over.

Like I said though, most of our furniture is quite cheap/old and it was bought when we were poor students with very little money so it would suit us to sell what we could and buy nice matching furniture when we got there. It's a different story if you have nice, expensive furniture/items that you just couldn't part with. I suppose everyone's circumstances are different.

Thank you everyone for the really helpful replies. The majority of the advice does seem to be to ship which is interesting.

I can imagine that it might be a bit stressful having to go out and spend a lot as soon as we arrive and to find the time to furniture shop. I think I was just rather shocked by the 5k quote. I had thought it might be around 2k which I was comfortable with - our stuff is definitely more IKEA/Argos than Habitat!

Thanks Sinurt - I think I will go back to the company and ask for a quote if we were to pack our own stuff - I am far too much of a control freak to let someone else pack my stuff anyway The guy I spoke to said it would cost more because its New Brunswick/far from the port so good to know you managed it on a price you were happy with.

Have you purchased a home already? If you have then you will know how many rooms you will need to furnish and their sizes. 3-4 bedrooms means 3-4 beds, chests of drawers, bedside tables, possibly extra wardrobes if you don't have built in closets.

Living room, family room, den/office,rec room/basement, dining room, eat-in kitchen? It soon adds up.

Linen and towels?

Don't underestimate the cost of just kitting out a kitchen with cooking implements,knives, crockery, silverware, glassware, serving dishes, baking tins, pots and pans etc, etc. Few of us go out and completely furnish a kitchen in one go. Most is accumulated over many years.

Also there is lots of very helpful advice already on the forum about shipping costs and self shipping, just search the forum under shipping costs, containers etc.

If you know that Fredericton (lovely place) is your destination, google furniture stores check their 'flyers' for prices or give them a ring, and also check kijiji.ca for second hand goods and furniture.

Good luck!

Second hand stuff does not come cheap in Canada, nothing like what you can pick stuff up for at boot fairs, auction houses and ebay in the UK.

Having just arrived here, I am so glad we made the decision to ship our things! We had probably 3 really nice pieces of furniture that we wanted to keep, and once you decide you want to ship, as others have said, you might as well ship the lot. For example, we don't particularly like our sofa and would happily replace it - but at the same time, we are going to be likely renting for a year or so before we buy somewhere so it will do until we know where we are buying and what the space looks like - and when we do replace it, it's a small 2-seater so will work in an office space or a basement.

My experience of selling the bits that we did sell in the UK - it was a lot of hassle, we didn't always get as much as we wanted for them, and a few things ended up going to the charity shop.

My experience of buying in Canada, is that we've so far spent about $2000 on just replacing the electric items (okay, that does include a big screen TV!!), another couple hundred on all the basics for groceries, plus things like first & last month rents, and all the other misc expenses associated with starting up. And don't get me started on the amount of money spent on small things like surge protectors and tv cables! It's insane!

Also, don`t forget that very few stores deliver for free. Imagine tacking $50 to each purchase (unless you find everything you want in a single store - very unlikely). It all adds up.

I would ship the lot and I would go out and buy additional stuff that is much, much cheaper in the UK to fill it up.

We shipped everything over in 20ft container inc. wardrobes, beds, sofas. We where able to arrange moving into our house and the arrival of our things via container. We moved in on 30th April Container arrived on 3rd May. It was fun for the boys to sleep on the floor for three nights. The container was shipped to Montreal then to Torronto and then transported to local Customs office. We have still purchased items of furniture here aswell. Things we like rather than what we need. Our container was unpacked on our driveway.
Most of our stuff in a two bedroom bungalow was wrapped and packed in a day and un loaded from ther container in two hours. We told the men organised to unload our container we wanted to unpack our stuff ourselves, they justy moved the large items of furniture where we wanted it.

We have been asking ourselves the same questions, and are currently looking at not shipping stuff. I don't think it is worth the money, when you consider what it would cost to ship the stuff I think you would be better of buying new in Canada.

We aren't planning on taking any "big" electricals such as TVs and if you don't have really expensive furniture (ours is mostly IKEA) then it hardly seems worth it. And when it comes to clothes we could either pay for additonal baggage with our flights, or get the stuff sent by post.

Depends what you are shipping. The cost of shipping translated into $ doesn`t buy much in Canada. I very much doubt you will be able to furnish a house in Canada for $5000 to $7000 depending on the exchange rate.

$7000 will likely get you a sofa, love seat and two beds, new from a store

in my experience I am glad we shipped, its scary how much it costs to replace everything from scratch, even after we shipped a 20ft container we still spent a huge amount just replacing the electricals, additional garden equip etc.

Also, unless you are going near an Ikea there is no cheap solution here

We also have kids, so the familiairity of getting your own stuff I think helped in the overall feeling of establishing ourselves here

also, dont forget to haggle we only paid £3000 approx for shipping a sole use 20ft container, you are not that far from Halifax.

Cheap new bed in UK, 100 quid from Argos.
Cheap new bed in Canada, $1000 for the box and mattress only from somewhere like the Brick or Leons.
Stuff isn't as cheap as you might think. Ship as much as you can.

Ikea is expensive in Canada. Everything is expensive here really. What seems cheap will fall apart very soon. You soon get tired of shopping and folding all the cardboard packaging.

Another vote for shipping. Otherwise you will be tired, in a hurry and will end up buying everything at IKEA. After tax it won't be as cheap as you thought, you won't really like it, but you wont be able to justify replacing it for years as you just bought it. I've done it both ways a number of times and have learned to bring everything. You can then replace what you don't like at leisure and get things you really want.