buying new furniture

[westie]

:P
We have both got jobs and are coming over on the 6th January. It looks as though the residency paper work will be ready in plenty of time. Yippee!

we have no valuable or sentimental items of furniture and have decided to sell the lot and buy new once over there. We have been given a few reasonable quotes for taking our personal stuff. We like Ikea and Habitat stuff is there anything like that in north island?

[veronica]

NO. but if you decide to buy new before you leave be careful cos if the customs see it you will be up for duty.

[Danpoll]

Your nearest Ikea is Melbourne, Brisbane and I think theres 1 in Sydney.

I would imagine there would be import duty if you bought and shipped it in from oz.

we were going to shift all our furniture before we left but it seems to be cheaper to throw evreything you have in a container.

Dan

[xanctus]

oh yeah...I can't believe there is no IKEA over NZ hahahahaha
is there any store that close enough to IKEA (in terms of design/style and price)?

[westie]

Xanctus
I am with you, why is there nothing like Ikea in NZ our friends in Auckland say you pay top dollar for swedish type furniture. If anyone knows different please let me know. I bought some really cool storage for my 11 year old son but it only cost £135 and I just cant justify how much it will cost to have it shipped over.

Vernonica thanks for the warning I did consider buying more furniture at one time and filling a container to make it worth our while to take a house full, but someone else gave me similar advise and we decided against it. Cheers Dan, does anyone one know how much it would cost to buy stuff from Oz? I am thinking it cant cost as much as bringing it over from the UK.

[veronica]

if you use your sons storage as packing so its full then that should justify the cost of taking it, thats if it won't breakdown and flatpack. and there is nothing like Ikea that we have seen here. I will try to find out if the import duty from Aus is high or if there is some sort of trade agreement on stuff like that.

[leslie]

i have made trans-con moves 4 times. if you do it by sealed, pack-own container it is vastly cheaper and easier than trying to do it at destination. i also find there is something depressing about living surrounded by entirely new stuff - espec if you cannot afford preferred from day 1.

when my gran/ grandpa moved my father to toronto they didn't take anything - sold all their lovely, irreplaceable stuff. wouldn't even let father take his beloved bed quilt - dont think he ever got over it. i think its easier to adjust with familiar things around you - chucking it all in seems fun at the time though!

[veronica]

Leslie I totally agree with your views on both packing and familiarity.

[Diny]

We thught about selling all our stuff over here and just taking a few personal items and then buy replacement furniture over there.

We have some nice pieces of furniture - some antiques we bought years ago and some that have been left to us by elderly relatives etc. Also got some new pieces (Ikea, Habitat etc) - we like a mix of ancient and modern !!

We then had a re-think. If we sold our newer furniture we'd get nowhere near market value for it. If we sold the antiques we'd miss them (they were also bought as investments).

The container is costing us 3050.00 for the full service, door to door delivery - pack & unpack.

There's NO WAY we would replace the furniture in one room for 3050 - never mind the entire house.

Ikea & Habitat don't exist is NZ, anything similar has a big price tag. And with all the respect in the world - what NZ consider to be antique is just really old furniture.

I totally agree that having your favourite arm chair to sit in and your familiar bed to sleep in must be a huge emotional comfort in the early days.

Whether new furniture is taken to NZ from Ikea UK or Ikea Oz - I'm pretty sure that you'd be wolloped with duty.

Diny

[shagen]

We are planning on bringing our existing furnitures from here to NZ when we move. Purely becasue of exchange rate, whatever we buy there will be more expensive than the cost of shipping it to NZ.

What puzzles me is how do you figure out if the furniture you bring is too big or too small for the place you will eventually settled into? If you already know where you are going to stay, that is fine. But for most folks like us who will be hunting for a place to stay only when we reach NZ, hwo is it going to be?

Has anyone had thoughts about this?

Cheers,