[marcia]

Just wanted to alert people - if you think your stuff may have to go into storage for a few weeks months, once it arrives here - I would recommend before you allow the shipping compnaies to charge you their raised prices to have a look around in the area you are going to settle for your own storage.

Our container is due in around the 12th jan, we still haven't found a house to buy and we're living in a furnished rental so have no where to put our stuff.

If the shipping company were to deal with it for us they would charge us a one off handling fee of $540 dollars to unpack the container and put it in storage and the storage would be $130 per week.

We have just been making enquires at a place here in Palmy called 'Fort Knox' and for an area big enough to store the contents of a 40 footer it will be about $50 per week!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The other advantage of this is we will have access to our stuff and go into the unit at any time to get boxes of anything we want.

So just a word of caution, don't let these shipping companies make you pay more than you need to for storage!

I still have to look into insurance for it whilst it is stored but would have had to extend our shipping insurance anyway.

[Debbie]

Great advice Marcia,
We were in a similar situation our 1 month free storage in the UK was up and we had to decide to ship or pay storage in the UK or NZ. In the end we told then to ship so we had more time to research NZ storage. We need not have paniced, it took the shipping company nearly 3 weeks to fit our container on a boat. It was due to land in Auckland on the 27th Nov but got sent to the wrong port so didn't arrive until the 12th Dec in which time we had compleated on our house.
The delays worked in our favour in this instance but we did find out that self store in Auckland would have been cheaper than storage at the shippers.
Debbie