To ship or not to ship
Saturday, 22 Apr 2006 | Leaving the Netherlands
The packing of my belongings has been a much easier task than I initially expected it to be. I felt the time given to me would not suffice and I would need to enlist the help of some friends to make it in time. It is now two weeks after signing the contract for the sale of my condominium and I’m just about finished. All that is left, are the clothes in my bedroom and the contents of my kitchen - perhaps a days work, if that. It was interesting to go through all the cabinets, cupboards and storage spaces in my place and decide for every single item if I wanted to keep it, sell it or would it go straight into the garbage. And for all the things I felt I wanted to keep, would I store them in the Netherlands, have them picked up by a moving company and stored until I find a job, or would I take them with me in September.
The really difficult decision now is if it is worth the money to actually ship things. I’ve requested some quotes from moving companies and all in all, the shipping of about 2 m3 (70 ft3) costs somewhere in between €1.000 and €1.500. A precise number depends on the actual destination, Hong Kong is more expensive than Bangkok for instance. Shipping less (in volume) doesn’t significantly lower the price. That translates into a certain amount per box, which makes it easy to figure out if something is worth shipping or not. The problem is that I think I’ll be able to ‘box’ about 1 m3 (35 ft3) of things I feel are worth shipping.
These are things like books and other personal items, plus things that I would need in a new place but would cost more to buy new than it would to simply ship them over. The problem is that if I can only manage to find 1 m3 worth of things to ship, the price per box doubles and then perhaps it is not worth shipping them anymore. To make the total volume approximate 2 m3, I figured I’d ship my bed too. The bed (deconstructed) with matrasses is about 1 cubic meter, so it would cost €500 to ship. Hardly worth that money, especially since I can probably get a good price for it on the secondhand market. So it looks like I won’t be able to make shipping worth my while and it would be easier to just buy everything I need at the actual destination.
Now, the only items I feel I certainly can not live without, are my espresso machine and coffee grinder. Shipping that alone is far too expensive. Sending it by mail is a problem, since mail has a max. of 20kg (44lbs) over here and the machine ways 26kg (57lbs). I have now gotten a tip to perhaps try and seperate some parts from the machine (such as the casing) and see if I can bring down the weight to under 20kg and then send it by mail. That would mean I would have probably have 2 20kg boxes to mail, which would cost approx €100 to mail. So there might be a solution if I really decide to only ship that.
The decision hasn’t been made yet.