(Not sure if this is really GQ, but that fits best for me.)
A friend has 27 m3 of furniture and stuff in storage in Sydney and plans to move it to New Zealand shortly.
How do these international moves work? I know that the stuff is packed into a container and shipped, but is that it? Should I try to find one company that does door to door, or are companies with commercial relationships an acceptable compromise? How long does it take? What pitfalls do I need to be aware of? Can I save money by sharing containers with others?
They work smoothly, in my experience. I moved from Ireland to Australia in 2003. Removalists called to my house in Dublin, looked over my furniture, estimated how much container space it would require, and quoted for door-to-door delivery to an as-yet-unidentified house in Perth. They didn’t have a branch in Perth; they simply had a relationship with an international network of furniture movers and knew that they could get a Perth firm to handle that end of the contract. And of course there was a shipping firm involved (two shipping firms, probably; my stuff spend a few days in Cape Town), customs clearance agents, and the Lord knows who else. But it all worked very smoothly.
It takes longer to move the furniture than it does to move yourself, so you will be without your furniture for a while, either in Sydney or in New Zealand or both, depending on how you time things. And there is always some degree of provisionality about the timescale that they quote for the move, if only because it depends on factors that they do not control, like customs/quarantine clearance times in the destination country.
And it can start to get very expensive if, by the time they are ready to deliver the furniture, you don’t have a house ready to receive it. We didn’t have that problem but we were warned that they charge handsomely for holding onto your furniture if they are ready and you aren’t. The only way to avoid this charge is to have it delivered to somewhere that offers a cheaper storage option and that, of course, means that when you do have a house ready you will have to enter into (and pay for) a new contract to remove the furnture from storage to your house.
Thanks UDS, that’s just the sort of information I was after.
For anyone else who is following, I have since found that shipping containers come in 20 foot lengths, with a capacity of between 28 to 33 m3, and 40 foot lengths (don’t know the capacity).
For my case with 27m3, that’s nearly one whole container so there’s not much chance of sharing. It may be that someone with only a few cubic metres can throw their stuff in, but the offset in cost would hardly be worth it.
Most places are quoting times of between 2 and 5 weeks, depending on the sorts of things that UDS has pointed out. So yes, timing may be an issue.