OK, so yesterday I emailed all the completed documents to the shipping company, following their instructions from a month ago so I knew that I had everything they'd requested.

This morning I received an email telling me that the 'goods to follow' spreadsheet wasn't any good, despite me clearing this with the company a month ago !!. My lovingly prepared list wasn't detailed enough for their insurance requirements apparently, they need to know exactly how many books, exactly how many bits of cutlery, exactly how many dvd's etc !!.

So, with 3 weeks to go I need to try and work out how many things I packed nearly 14 months ago, whoop

So come on, what were your last minute disasters before you left ?.

Or is this where you all laugh and point at the dopey ginge who ballsed up in the last month !!!.

I don't understand that, we just said books, cloths, cutlery etc.... Customs were not at all worried about that.

We went to see our shipping company today and they said we only had to state

Box 1 of 50 Cutlery
Box 2 of 50 Towels

etc etc...

Politely explain that every other shipping company - and customs - will accept general numbers and descriptions like "box of DVD's","cutlery and crockery", "two boxes of toys", etc - and ask them if perhaps you have made a mistake choosing their company, after them giving you such a good impression and price

From what I have read about insurance is, if you generalize about the items eg glassware, crockery etc then you run the risk of a few higher priced items being given an average (lower) value if you needed to make a claim. I also suppose it depends whether you are looking for itemised insurance which covers breakages, mold etc or total loss. For total loss type insurance I would be very surprised if you needed to itemise at all.

In terms of goods to follow and shipping insurance I think they are somewhat unrelated.

I would tell them that they either accept the list as is or they cancel your insurance premium and give you a refund.

Point is, there are so many 'get out' clauses written into the insurance's terms and conditions, even if in the event of a claim you were able to (without a shadow of doubt) nail the party responsible for any loss, they would find a way to wriggle out of it.

Insurance in shipping is like extended warranties on electrical goods.... money for nothing. If a list of slight detail is good enough for governments and their immigration departments, then it is good enough for a bunch of money grabbing shysters IMO.

I was told the exact same thing when receiving some clothes by Fed-Ex, but this was for customs and not insurance.
I had to go to customs at the airport to itemize every single item that was in the box. The fact that I was the recipient, and not the sender, seemed a bit lost on them.
Ultimately, they released the box to me but said next time everything has to be itemized.

OK- I have just re-read your original post (properly now!) and kinda get what they mean with regards to insurance.

Perhaps you can be a bit more specific - but still not exact.

Try something like "box of 80 DVD's" or "Kitchen crockery - Denby dinner service for 6" or something like that?

The reason I say this as we were caught out anyway - read the small print carefully - each of our cartons was only insured for 40GBP, regardless of what was in it, unless we had very specifically itemised/categorised everything.

However, I still appreciate that as you packed so long ago,this might be an impossible task anyway

Well, I got a list sorted for them, with a lot of guesswork and trawling my memory and I finally got a 'we're happy' email

The really important stuff is covered and I'm happy with that

It did bugger up my last day at work though as most of it was spent sorting that out rather than saying goodbye !!!.

I'll be so glad to get there and get settled, I'm bored with waiting now