Shipping container moving?

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Has anyone here ever bought/leased a shipping container to move all your stuff?
Also anyone had said container actually shipped on a ship (ie over the ocean)?

We basically want to just pack up all the stuff we have here and send it, because this starting your life over again after moving thing is kind of shit and we’ve both done it once already.

Any unexpected issues we should look out for, or suggestions about uncommon solutions/options etc?
 
U

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Has anyone here ever bought/leased a shipping container to move all your stuff?
Also anyone had said container actually shipped on a ship (ie over the ocean)?

We basically want to just pack up all the stuff we have here and send it, because this starting your life over again after moving thing is kind of shit and we’ve both done it once already.

Any unexpected issues we should look out for, or suggestions about uncommon solutions/options etc?

I’ve essentially done this twice. I didn’t lease a container per se though. I used an international movers company to do it. The second time there weere three parties in total involved: The UK removals company, the shipping company who orchestrated the whole thing, and the US company who then did the final move here.

When I get my stuff here it was in multiple wooden shipping boxes and my understanding is that I shared a container with other people.

The only issue we had was waiting on custom’s clearence which took longer than I expected. That said, the whole thing was very effeiciently done.

The first time I was originally going to be located in Texas but a few days before delivery I was sent over to San Francisco - thankfully the US company handled the change with ease and my stuff ended up arriving just 1 day after I got my apartment.

Obviously ths was UK to US - can’t speak for Thai to Oz. But I can’t imagine it would be all that different.
 
D

Deleted member 199

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I’ve essentially done this twice. I didn’t lease a container per se though. I used an international movers company to do it. The second time there weere three parties in total involved: The UK removals company, the shipping company who orchestrated the whole thing, and the US company who then did the final move here.

When I get my stuff here it was in multiple wooden shipping boxes and my understanding is that I shared a container with other people.

The only issue we had was waiting on custom’s clearence which took longer than I expected. That said, the whole thing was very effeiciently done.

The first time I was originally going to be located in Texas but a few days before delivery I was sent over to San Francisco - thankfully the US company handled the change with ease and my stuff ended up arriving just 1 day after I got my apartment.

Obviously ths was UK to US - can’t speak for Thai to Oz. But I can’t imagine it would be all that different.

yeah we essentially did a small scale version of that when we moved here, mostly less-urgent clothes, extra stuff for the dog (who came here too but isn’t around now to make the trip back 😔) etc. it was 5 or 6 boxes of stuff basically.


what we have to go back is an entire two story house + shed full of stuff. There’s realistically very little opportunity here to get much value from the stuff by selling it, and there’s 0 chance we can “keep” the house here and come back to it for holidays (not because of needing to sell it, because of in-laws - practically we can’t sell it so taking ~9 years of bought furnishings is the only way to not have the move be ridiculously expensive by the time we buy everything again)


I think buying a container is our best bet because once we get it there we can just get it sent wherever we end up and use it as storage (not aiming anywhere even remotely close to a major city so space shouldn’t be any problem at all.
 
U

User.191

Guest
yeah we essentially did a small scale version of that when we moved here, mostly less-urgent clothes, extra stuff for the dog (who came here too but isn’t around now to make the trip back 😔) etc. it was 5 or 6 boxes of stuff basically.


what we have to go back is an entire two story house + shed full of stuff. There’s realistically very little opportunity here to get much value from the stuff by selling it, and there’s 0 chance we can “keep” the house here and come back to it for holidays (not because of needing to sell it, because of in-laws - practically we can’t sell it so taking ~9 years of bought furnishings is the only way to not have the move be ridiculously expensive by the time we buy everything again)


I think buying a container is our best bet because once we get it there we can just get it sent wherever we end up and use it as storage (not aiming anywhere even remotely close to a major city so space shouldn’t be any problem at all.
We’re planning on heading back to the UK within the next 4 years, and we’ve already decided that a lot of the furnite will just be thrown away before we leave. All the beds, office furniture, seating (bar my expensive office chair, and a very nice leather bround library chair), and our antique table and sideboard [both of which came with me from the UK in the first place]) will be thrown out as there’s little point in keeping any of it given that the time and money spent in replacing it will be cheaper than the shipping.

We’re going to essentially use this as an opportunity to slim down. In addition all the electronics (outside of conputers etc.) will have to go (you’ll prize the BW 600 speakers out my cold dead fingers though) as well.
 
D

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we’ve already decided that a lot of the furnite will just be thrown away before we leave
I think in another reality where we'd moved significantly sooner, and/or ridiculous levels of DIY wasn't essentially a necessity to be satisfied where we are currently, we might have done this too.

But in this reality, things have progressed for me personally over the last 5 or so years in terms of having to learn a bunch of DIY stuff, (basically since we moved into this house, before which the most I'd done really was to put up a shelf on a brick wall) to the point that I expect we'll end up finding a house to renovate ourselves when we move back, and I imagine by the time we move a good 1/3 of a 20' container will be basically the contents of the tool shed we built last year.

I'm sure we'll take some furniture with us (e.g. our bed is teak, but will disassemble to become relatively compact) but honestly I don't think furniture is the real driving thing for me at least (a number of the biggest solid furniture items, we put into rooms before a renovation, we literally cannot get out of the rooms they're in now, without cutting them up, due to size). I think it's just the accumulation of a lot of smaller things over time. And while some stuff is probably no more expensive to just buy new again - a lot of it to me is about the time&effort cost of finding the things you need/want and are happy with, all over again.
 

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I do it for work all the time. Mostly from China to the UK. Things have gotten really expensive with delays as well. If it were me I'd be really ruthless about what I wanted to keep. Might just be cheaper to sell stuff locally and re buy in the new place. The hit you take isn't as much as the shipping quote maybe.

That said I know things like sofa's are on a three or four month wait!
 
D

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I do it for work all the time. Mostly from China to the UK. Things have gotten really expensive with delays as well. If it were me I'd be really ruthless about what I wanted to keep. Might just be cheaper to sell stuff locally and re buy in the new place. The hit you take isn't as much as the shipping quote maybe.

That said I know things like sofa's are on a three or four month wait!
Yeah we'd originally planned this type of approach, but the problem is, there's not much market for second hand higher value goods here. If people have the money to pay for something decent, they tend to have enough money to pay for it new (and want to show off that it's new, no matter how utilitarian the item is), and if they're on a budget there are cheap Chinese knockoff / counterfeit options available for less, new, than we'd want to sell the stuff for, used.

Are the delays you see flow on from the backlog around Suez, or related to something else?

I'm hoping that Thailand > Australia should be a relatively cluster-fuck free journey, but I guess that's also an unknown.
 
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