is it worth shipping furniture?

[The Smith Clan]

Trying to work out shipping costs, is it worth taking furniture or is it cheaper to buy once we arrive. Will need a 20ft for personal belongings, kids items etc, is 40ft much more?

Thanks in advance.

 

Maria x

[Suzukiscottie]

It's about 20ft more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry; I'll get my coat................

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[srg73]

For us, we bought nearly everything and it removed the stress of having to buy everything again. However do consider the following

 

electrical goods will need adaptors which are not easy to buy unless cheap and nasty imports which can set fire

tv will only work with box such as FOXTEL ie they are like monitors

dab must be dab+

untreated timber goods will be stopped in customs

Australia has a habit of buying very contemporary goods meaning if your not wanting latest trends then you can buy 2nd hand quite cheaply via eBay, gumtree etc.

beds are different sizes here however not an issue if flat sheets

there are some outlets which are so cheap its criminal such as Kmart etc

 

Australia is very much like UK, you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want. We imported our furniture as I HAD to bring a record collection of 6000 12's and we are glad we did as we like our solid timber Next furniture and have not found anything like it here.

 

Also so consider how many clothes and games etc as life is much more outdoors here. I have boxes of clothes still packed and things like games consoles we will hang onto as show pieces only.....original Atari, SNES etc etc.

 

Ultimately personal choice and cost wise seem to recall additional 20ft is approx 50% increase in shipping I've £4K for 20 and £6k for 40.

 

S

[Guest]

Depends on you really. If your furniture is good quality and you like it, ship it. Chances are to buy like for like here (ie good solid table and chairs) will cost you. Same with sofas. Sure you can go get the cheap ones from the usual places but good quality ones are far more expensive. Our sofa would have looked really odd in our house here. It just wouldn't have worked so while it was lovely, it was better sold before we left and I have no regrets. Same with some other stuff.

 

Personally, we decided to only ship personal effects, our KS bed, 2 sets of drawers, a desk, chair and blanket box furniture wise. The rest, even my lovely old dining table we sold before we left. We've replaced here with a second hand on from gumtree, 6 seater table and chairs and a welsh dresser for $270 for the lot. Same with a few other things. We bought new sofas 6 months after we bought our house as I couldn't find anything I liked in that time. Was so fed up as everything was big square and leather or like something out of the 80's. And I am not a fan of either of those. Eventually discovered Freedom and found a sofa I love. Cost though. Till then we made do with a crappy Ikea thing for about $300.

 

Our bedrooms have either walk in robes or built ins so we don't need to worry about that. And for the rest, we've added as we've gone along. Sometimes buying second hand to see us through till we find something we like and want new.

 

Also keep in mind you'll be without you stuff one end or the other for a chunk of time. We preferred to be doing the camp out thing in the UK as we borrowed off friends, kept back the stuff we were not shipping and sold it all off in the run up to us leaving. The last 2 weeks we were sitting on a single mattress and some cushions on it for a sofa. Plus 2 camping chairs. We kept back a few crappy things for the kitchen but I did ship ALL my kitchen items from cutlery to mixers to kettle. I picked up a few plates in Ikea and so on to use till we moved and we gave those to the charity shop the day before we left. Dinners were either things I could cook in one pan or on a baking sheet in the oven for the last week :cute: We also had take out from our favourite Chinese a few times :smile:

 

We used a large MoveCube, got loads in. Total of about 30 or so tea chest sized boxes of personal effects and our furniture, plus bikes, set of golf clubs and bag, lamps and some other random items. Cost about £1200 door to door and then the import fees, about $300 the other end. Self packing, self loading and worked for us.

[Wirephobia]

40' door to door is costing us £4.7k plus 2% (of the contents value) insurance

[NicF]

Unless everything you own is Argos type flat pack furniture and/or you are happy to replace everything with Argos equivalent furniture or second hand stuff then yes it's worth bringing. Despite what people here keep telling you, beds aren't that different size wise - we recently bought a new single bed and the UK sheets we have fit fine. You just have to remember that a UK king size is the same as an Australian queen and you will be fine. Oh and electrical stuff just needs new plugs on, which don't cost much, and for those things where you can't change the plug you can bring a few UK power boards and just change the plugs on those instead.

 

If you are really not sure do the maths. £4k on a container will give you about $8k to spend here, plus any money you could make from selling your furniture in the UK, so maybe $10k to spend here, perhaps slightly more depending on what your existing furniture could sell for. Have a look at some websites for furniture here to see what you could actually buy for your $10k and see if you would be happy with that. Remember to look at the cost of replacing everything that you would decide not to ship. Then factor in the effort you would have to put in to sell your existing stuff and go out and buy all new stuff compared with the inconvenience of not being with your stuff for 3 months (although remember you might have to wait for your furniture to be delivered here anyway depending on where you buy from) and make a value judgement based on how you personally feel about which would suit you best.

 

Just to give an idea of what it might cost to replace all your furniture we recently had to replace a number of items that were damaged in a flood. We replaced most, but not all, the furniture in our family room, all the furniture in one bedroom, some of the drawers and shelving units in one of the other bedrooms and the washing machine and a freezer and spent over $14k. Yes we could have bought some stuff cheaper but nothing we bought was seriously high quality (except the freezer) and a fair bit was from IKEA and Bunnings.

[Patphillips47]

For us, we bought nearly everything and it removed the stress of having to buy everything again. However do consider the following

 

electrical goods will need adaptors which are not easy to buy unless cheap and nasty imports which can set fire

tv will only work with box such as FOXTEL ie they are like monitors

dab must be dab+

untreated timber goods will be stopped in customs

Australia has a habit of buying very contemporary goods meaning if your not wanting latest trends then you can buy 2nd hand quite cheaply via eBay, gumtree etc.

beds are different sizes here however not an issue if flat sheets

there are some outlets which are so cheap its criminal such as Kmart etc

 

Australia is very much like UK, you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want. We imported our furniture as I HAD to bring a record collection of 6000 12's and we are glad we did as we like our solid timber Next furniture and have not found anything like it here.

 

Also so consider how many clothes and games etc as life is much more outdoors here. I have boxes of clothes still packed and things like games consoles we will hang onto as show pieces only.....original Atari, SNES etc etc.

 

Ultimately personal choice and cost wise seem to recall additional 20ft is approx 50% increase in shipping I've £4K for 20 and £6k for 40.

 

S

Either cut off and replace plugs or take some UK power boards ,cut the main plug off and replace and you have a ready made adaptor

Xmas decorations Get through inspections form quarantine we had a wand taken off Santa and fur cones seized - too expensive to fumigate

Garden tools need to be spotless ,we took an electric lawnmower which was truly spotless but it was shame cleaned and ruined by quarantine

Yhis move we have a 40 Ft container and will take everything including out car It's a personal choice really and depends on how attached you are to out furniture etc Me I feel it helps me settle to have my familiar stuff around me but that's me '

[Marisawright]

I second everything NicF said. I know it sounds expensive to ship the lot - but it is also expensive to replace it. Also, it takes time! I know that when I arrived in the UK, I totally underestimated how long it would take me just to work out where the furniture shops were (and of course I couldn't even get to them until we'd bought a car, since they're all in retail parks or outer suburbs - which is also the case in Australia). Then I found that most of the lounge suites and beds I really liked had to be ordered so would take 6-8 weeks so I might as well have shipped me own stuff after all!

 

I have ended up with furniture based on what was available, not on what I really like. If we were staying in the UK, I would be replacing it sooner rather than later - which means the money I spent on it was wasted, and I'd have been better off spending that money on shipping my own stuff.