RollTide

Hi everyone, I'm really hoping for some friendly advice.

I've decided that I am moving back to Scotland before the end of the year or as soon as I sell my home. I live in Frisco, Texas in a lovely sought after neighbourhood so I think it will sell very quickly.

My question is- should I sell all the contents and start afresh in the UK or is it more sensible to ship, via container, my favourite pieces to bring back?

The only items I will be considering in the move are:-

Leather sofa & love seat (electric recliner set which is brand new and I love)
Media console unit
End table & matching sofa table
3 lamps
Two boxes of kitchen stuff (pots & pans, knives)
5 x 7 rug

I do have a king size bed with upholstered headboard that I would love to bring but I'm unsure if it would be too big for the smaller bedrooms in the UK.

Any advice/comments on how much this would cost to ship back. Not too bothered about how long it will take to arrive as I will be staying with my sister for as long as I need to find accommodation and my brother has agreed to store until then.

Thanks in advance. This site is a godsend.

not2old

what will it cost to ship that stuff?

If its $3000, then you need to decide if its worth it, how old is what you have, will it fill or match in the place you plan to move to in the UK, will anything get damaged & also you will need to change the electrical fittings & get transformers for the 110v reclining furniture.

Is there anything on your list that you won't be able to get or replace back home?

And of course, the cost of storage

.

curleytops

I think that's the key question right there. The large items you mentioned are easily replaced here and if you end up with smaller rooms in your new place in the UK you may well have a problem with the furniture you have now. It would be awful to fork out shipping costs only to have to turn around and sell the stuff over here anyway.

As for kitchen items, well, pots and pans are easily replaced. FWIW I like the set of cookware I got from Pro-Cook here far better then the Lagostina and Revere I used in North America and the price was reasonable. Things like Corning and Corelle are more expensive here. I don't think it's worth bringing small appliances because of the voltage and transformer issues but that's just my opinion. Lamps are easily converted but there's the cost/risk of damage issue to consider.

I suppose this is a time to be ruthless (accept that there are almost always sentimental casualties of some sort) and it makes you think about what possessions really matter to you. Good luck

Novocastrian

We shipped a partial container load eastwards across the ocean earlier this year. It was priced by volume. I think it was about 300 cu.ft. and cost us just under $Cdn 5K.

In our case clothes and books took up most of the space and I notice they don't figure in your list.

I agree with curley, forget the pots & pans and the king sized bed.

I'm also wondering if you'd love the electric recliner quite so much if it was attached to a transformer, buzzing annoyingly as you reclined.

RollTide

Thanks everyone for the quick responses. I think I'm leaning towards selling the stuff and then just buying new when I arrive. The size dimensions will be a factor too as well as the shipping costs.

I guess it's mostly the sentimental factor and I do so love these pieces but not that much if it's going to be so expensive to ship!!!

spouse of scouse

I think you've had some great advice, it's similar to what people advised me when I asked the question. As a result, we have a small enough load that we can send it via airfreight relatively cheaply. It's just bits and pieces really, some much loved books, photographs, some vintage china.

The only thing I've probably been a bit silly about is bed linen, I love a particular brand and it's much more expensive in the UK, so I've been shopping the sales here and am bringing a load over. I don't want to compare the cost of buying it here plus air freight, with the cost of buying it over there, because I don't think I'd like the answer

Best of luck with the packing - it can be quite liberating to pare down your possessions to the essentials, and of course you then have the pleasure of buying new things that are just right for your new place.

Edit - I forgot about Scouse's 3 signed and framed football shirts. There was no way he was leaving them behind :-)

holly_1948

Selling up has been the best answer in the past.
BUT . . .
shipping rates are presently the lowest they have been in many years.

So there is no substitute for getting current quotes for shipping a whole container load before making even an emotional decision. Also some shippers may have moved less with the times than others, so you need multiple quotes - even though that is hard work most people would wish to evade.
And if you are moving to a rural location you might want to look into actually buying the container and have in delivered to your land.

Pulaski

I am fairly certain that a US sofa and love seat won't fit in most British houses. My parents had the devil's own job finding a sofa and easy chairs in the UK that would fit in their very average 3-up 2-down British semi. I don't believe any sofa or easy chairs I have ever seen in the US would fit in their living room.

curleytops

I think it's safe to say they definitely fall into the "non-negotiable" category

erictheone

I'm about to return to the UK after 14 years in Singapore, and faced a similar dilemma. What I learnt:

Even if I wanted to sell or dispose of my furniture, etc, here, I'd still end up with far too much "small" stuff (clothes, books, CDs, etc) to bring back with me on the plane. So I'd have to pay for some sort of shipping or air freight, even if only for a small volume, and I think that must be true for almost anyone returning after many years away.

Shipping small amounts loose cargo (individual boxes) is much more costly, on a per cuft basis, than having your own container (known as "FCL") even if it's half full. So I'll be taking almost all my furniture and possessions, in a dedicated two-thirds full 20ft container, simply because the extra cost of doing that, compared with shipping, say, 200 cuft, is tiny.

The other key thing I discovered is that paying for a door-to-door service is far more costly than two separate contracts - one door-to-port (in my case, from my home in Singapore, to the port of Southampton in the UK) and then a second port-to-door (Southampton to my UK home). It seems that the profit margin that agents charge in the "returning" country to the firm you'll appoint in the country you're sending your stuff from is very steep. There's a tiny bit of admin involved in this - but doing it this way saves me almost GBP 1,000. Of course if your company is paying for your move, not you, then this might not matter.

Finally, think carefully about insurance. "Total loss" cover, which ONLY covers for a ship sinking (etc) and nothing at all being recovered, would cost me 1.5% of whatever the REPLACEMENT cost of the stuff I'm sending, which actually seems very high for such restricted cover. And if I want full cover for damage, etc, door-to-door, that goes up to a massive 3.5%. The premiums may differ in different parts of the world, but I guess by not much. I'm still not sure that even "total loss" cover is worth it - how many times do we hear of cargo ships sinking?

Novocastrian

I agree about the insurance. It's a rip-off and we declined it.

Pulaski

Container vessel El Faro sank last week.

scot47

Second-hand furniture is so cheap in the UK that it is almost free.

aratan

Even if emotionally attached to your king-sized bed, I would not recommend shipping it back to the UK. Bed size is different in the UK & Europe, and you would have a much harder time finding bed linen to fit it.

becks_r

HI - this is all good advice, and I can't talk about shipping back to UK, as I have only shipped from UK to US. But what I learnt was that the insurance is a pain to claim on and so many small print loop holes that they wriggled out of paying for most of the problems. So look into insurance carefully - I was in a hurry to get it sorted so didn't investigate as much as I should have. I think it might be cheaper to get insurance to just pay back the shipping costs if the ship sinks, because it is less likely than damage to the shipment itself, but I don't know this for certain. Also, if you split the agents as suggested above, they might each blame the other for damage, so you may never get paid if the worst happens...

Also, I started with a much smaller list of things to ship, but too much to send via DHL or someone like that. So the cost per cuft started as very expensive, but then I found out the price for half a container was cheaper per cuft. So I started with things that I couldn't replace here - out of print books, sentimental items etc. Then just kept adding things until the shippers said it wouldn't fit.

I also agree with electrical stuff - the recliner will be noisy with a transformer. and probably won't fit. I remember moving in the UK and finding the doorways in the Victorian cottage we were moving to were too small for our bed, so think about the type of place you are likely to move to. If your brother is happy to store things, at least then you can go visit houses in UK and measure rooms, doorways etc before you have to make the decision which items to ship.