Moving to Australia

MOVING TO AUSTRALIA
REMOVAL GUIDE

If you are moving to Perth, Western Australia and have a place of your own in the UK then your are bound to have a few bits and pieces you will want to take with you. It may only be a few boxes or it could be a 20ft container but either way the chances are it will be a whole heap more than the 25Kg most airlines restrict you to.

When you move to Australia you will basically have two choices on how you want transfer your belongings.

AIR FREIGHT
Air Freight is an expensive way of moving your belongings but if you have some stuff that you absolutely cant wait to be with you then it may be the only option. If its not to heavy you may even be able to include it in your baggage allowance.

Don’t just assume this method will not be a problem though. I thought we would be allowed double the baggage allowance because we were only flying one way (with many airlines this was an option once but not any longer) turned out I was wrong. It would have been cheaper to book my extra suitcase a seat than pay excess baggage. Lucky for us I still had time to add it to the stuff we were shipping by sea. Air freight would have been a little cheaper but still far more than I wanted to pay

SEA FREIGHT
This will be the method chosen by most people. OK so you have the time delay while your belongings make their way over to Perth, Western Australia (usually about 10 weeks) but for most people it just gives them time to find a place of their own and should not cause too much inconvenience. In our case we actually paid for storage of our belongings over in Perth for 4 weeks while we waited until we moved into our own home. We were allowed to go take a few things out of storage which was good.

If you are transferring your belongings by Sea Freight then they will be packed into a container. This you will either have to yourself or else share with other people, depending on how many possessions you are shipping. A standard container is 1172 cubic feet. That is 232x92x97.

We shared a container when we moved over to Perth as we only had about 540 cubic feet of possessions to move over the Ocean. We owned a 2 bedroom flat so that should give you a little bit of a guideline on the space you will take up. Or to get a better idea check out the John Mason website.

They now have an excellent area where you can get an online quote.

You just enter your name and email address and away you go. Of course you can always use this facility just to get an idea of how much an individual item would cost to move. (for example a double bed and mattress would cost you GBP 217 to move. When you share a container you will probably find that they will pack your possessions into cartons (vary in size and even have cartons designed to take clothes hanging) or for the large unusual shaped items packaged well. Once this has been done then your possessions will be loaded and sealed into wooden crates before going into the container.

With a shared container you have the disadvantage of waiting for the rest of the container to be filled which will mean that your shipment will take a little longer.

If you have the need for a full container it does give you that added bonus that your possessions and furniture will probably be loaded straight into the container at your home and it will then go straight down to the port for immediate shipment.