British Expats - Suggestions for volume shipping of about 1/2 container?

There are quite a few posts about shipping on this forum if you sniff around - many of them by me - we recently shipped all our stuff in a 20ft sole use full container from UK to Charleston, SC for £2000 door to door. Your quotes of £3500/£4500 look pretty steep in comparison, but it of course depends on what part of the US you're heading for. We're only about 12 miles from the port, and it's an East coast port.

When it comes to unloading your container this end, there are PLENTY of people/firms advertising in Yellow Pages or Craigslist.com who will help for a reasonable fee.

We ummed and ahhed for a long time debating whether to sell/chuck most of our stuff and buy new when we got here. It would have cost more to do so (especially with the pathetic state of that piece of crap known as The Pound) and it's nice to have all our stuff which we've chosen over the years. Apart from much of our electrical stuff which wouldn't work on 110V - which we sold / gave away. And also bear in mind that if you do decide to sell your stuff, you'll probably get next to nothing for it.

Here's a copy of what I posted just after all our stuff arrived safe and well:

Just thought I'd add my experience to this if anyone's interested...

After we arrived in the US, I emailed our UK shipping agent (Eagle Relocations) to ask for the details of the US receiving agent - they replied with the details, I phoned the US agent, they said they'd phone me when the container is ready for delivery. They did, and gave me the trucking company's number to call and arrange a time for delivery, which I did. It arrived with CUSTOMS SEAL INTACT. No customs inspection, no customs charges. Nice. I'd borrowed a neighbour's Dremel cutter in anticipation - the shipping agent told me that the seal would be intact and the driver would not have any tools, but he had a bolt cropper to chop it off. We'd had a similar experience with a container a couple of years ago - the driver only had a club hammer and all my tools were in the container! So we just attacked the customs seal with the hammer for 10 minutes until it eventually gave up the fight.

So now we have FURNITURE and stuff! What we've unpacked so far (which is the vast majority of our stuff) is all happily perfect and unbroken. Only complaint so far is that one of our beds was loaded on its side directly onto the container floor so was dirty, but my genius wife managed to clean the filth off with about half an hour of elbow grease.

8th April - container loaded at our house in UK
30th April - ship arrived at Charleston Port (SC, USA)
6th May - container arrived at our house

Moral of this rambling story: I would recommend Eagle Relocations (www.eaglerelocations.com). Cost £2000 (Farnborough UK to Charleston US 20ft container) plus £150 for two blokes to load the container (UK) and $100 for two blokes (off craigslist) to help unload this end. Our contact person there was Annette. And no, I don't work for them and I'm not on commission / backhanders!