Well, who would have thought it but we are now only days away from catching a plane and starting our new life in Australia.

The shippers came on Thursday and Friday last week. The photo above shows our dining room after day one. What you see there (click thumbnail for a larger image) represents about 25% of the stuff we ended up taking to Australia.

Since getting our original quotation from white and company, I’m chuffed to bits that we managed to ‘loose’ the 10 boxes of ‘stuff’ that we needed to loose to fill only half a container, however we are still finding odd bits and bobs that we wished we’d packed and shipped when we had the opportunity, still, we always have the final suitcase cramming session to look forward to in the next day or so.

The shippers that we ended up choosing, White and Company did a good job packing all of our stuff although I was a little disappointed that the guys ran out of sufficient boxes and materials during day two meaning that we had to utilize some of the less adequate boxes that we’d already packed in the previous months.

Still, in general the service up to this stage has been excellent. The original advice from the chap at White and Company who did the original quotation kind of went out of the window.

We were originally told things such as no mixing and matching of stuff in boxes, no padding your plates with your duvet covers etc… That all went out of the window with our packers telling us that they do it all the time. It seems as long as everything is clearly documented there shouldn’t be any problems.

To be honest it was probably this that helped us cut down the total boxes required as originally we had quite a few half boxes full of certain types of stuff because we couldn’t mix and match. If this new advice leads to our stuff being stuck in Australian customs for 12 months then I’ll let you know.

Lots of stuff to update you guys on including the news that I’ve managed to secure a job in Aus but I’ll post this update when I have a little more time.