Tuesday 29 May 2012

Shipping Our Things to NZ

As I write this Sarah and Mia are up in the air and on their first leg of their journey to New Zealand!


Since the last post, we have been flat out organizing things and visiting people, its been a busy time. We have been through all of our stuff; clothes, books, DVDs, CDs, Amelia's things and everything else. Then we either sold them, gave them to friends or charity or bin/recycled them. It was quite hard work, and I still have a bit more to do all on my own.


As you have probably worked out the flights have been booked, we used The Flight Centre and are flying with Singapore Airlines as they had the best price/connections that suited us. We both decided that we wanted to do the flight in one go with no stop overs, and the connection time with Singapore was just over an hour!

Finally we sorted out our shipping. Initially we looked at three companies: PSS, Anglo Pacific, and Seven Seas. PSS and Anglo Pacific both have form that you fill out on line, where you basically list everything that you want to take. They then come to your house on the chosen day and pack everything up for you and take it off to the container.

With Seven Seas they work slightly differently, and you order what they call a move cube, which is basically a small container that they drop off for the day and you fill it up however you want yourself. The move cubes come in Small Medium and Large. Because of this there is no list to complete, you just take your best guess at the size you want, and then they can ship anything that doesn't fit into the move cube as individual boxes.

So our quotes were probably not 100% equal between companies, regardless PSS came out substantially cheaper. We also know someone else who had used them, so we decided to get them to come around to our house and do a more accurate quote. This they do for free, but I did have to talk them around as they say they only do this for big moves and we are only moving part household. The man who came around was very pleasant and helpful, and I just walk around the house with him and pointed out what I wanted to take. He worked out the volumes on the fly, and by the end he informed us that it was 293 cubic feet, which was almost double the volume that we had quoted ourselves online, oops!

Just to make sure we had even quotes I then contacted the other two companies and asked them to quote based on the accurate figure. All of the quotes actually came in around the same cost, so we decide to use PSS as they had done the quote.

The estimated cost is £1446. This figure is not final, it will go up or down depending how much stuff they pack up on the day. So we are reconsidering what we want/need to take to get the cost down as much as possible.

There will also be a customs charge at the other end of around £180, which we pay at the time. We also decided to take out some insurance through PSS for our bed and a few other valuable things, which was relatively inexpensive.

There is also a possibility that NZ customs will charge us for cleaning too! They randomly inspect crates for any items that may pose a risk to their flora or fauna, so anything that has been outside, especially near farmland. And if they do find anything risky, then they take it away and 'treat' it, at our expense! So it will be my job to thoroughly clean and disinfect the risky items such as camping gear, and Amelia's toys that have been outside. What a fun job!

The shipping should take between 8-12 weeks door to door, although I have been lead to expect delays to this.


So I think we have taken care of most of the big stuff, I just have to finish getting rid of the things we don't need and start getting things ready for PSS.

I still have to sell my car though, so if anyone wants an 03 Peugeot 307, give me a shout!

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