International moving....options other than containers?

[pocketandsweet]

We are moving to Canada in August. We are renting out our house here so will need to send only a carefully edited selection of things we really need/love. It will be mostly clothes, books and toys. I am in the process of checking out my shipping options. Any advice?

Sea freight (container) is the cheapest and you can take up a bit of space in a shared container (by volume). Air freight is more expensive but obviously much faster. Depends on how fast you need it. Sorry but i have no idea about shipping costs from UK to Canada.....

We aren't sending back a full container to UK, just about 200 square feet, the moving company are fitting it all into a lift van, it's a wooden crate you can walk into, opens in the one end about 7.5ft long x 7.5ft tall x 4.5ft wide I was told they can fit a set number of these into a 40 foot container, they lock it and then it gets re opened at your new house.

We just shipped 17 boxes with AngloPacific, door to door, London to LA for less than £500. Was really impressed with their service - they dropped off boxes and picked them up two weeks later. Think you have to leave at least 6 weeks transit time though.

Rory, should have Sid, it was about 100sq feet, by sea.

*sorry, should have said! Bloody ipad

100 cubic feet. Post fail

We got a buy one get one free offer with Seven seas - 23 boxes (book box and tea chest size mixed), a dolls house, a large bike trailer, paintings and a cot to Malaysia for about 700pounds.

Why didn't I read your post sooner Loopy? we are paying a lot more than that for a bit less I think.
It's my fault (according to DH) for leaving it so late...

Move cube we did two and it worked out well

We did a part container. It was much cheaper than a whole container, but did take much longer as they had to wait for the other half to fill.

Are you leaving furniture in your house for rent? We were strongly advised against leaving anything in our house, and regretted the things we did leave (a couple of wardrobes and a chest of drawers) as our tenants broken them and then charged us to repair them. Very annoying!

Have you looked at ubag.com? Just shipped 300kg of stuff from UK to Jordan, door to door and cost £1000. Not cheap, but was quick & good customer service. (Was also within our relocation budget so didn't mind paying )