Moving From BC

[Gus]

We are selling our home in British Columbia and need to move household goods here. Has anyone done that? A pod would be my choice. Thanks

[kalakoa]

PODS doesn't serve Hawaii; you want UPack.

['elepaio]

Plenty PODS beside Ross ... reminds me of tribbles.

[Chas]

This is copied and pasted from another thread I answered.

I know this thread is about containers, but if you are just wanting to get stuff over here, I think a moving company is better. They pack it, move it and unpack it for you.

I was skeptical as I've heard mostly horror stories about moving companies. Since all the reviews for all movers are "best ever" to "worst ever", I just picked one. I used City Moving with great results. They were EVERYTHING you would hope for. Great guys came and packed and loaded my stuff in PA. Took about 2 weeks for the stuff to get here. Another week till they brought it to the house and another great crew unloaded it and took the furniture upstairs and placed it in position.

I had packed all the boxes. Only one box was a little crushed on one side and some stuff came out. It was not damaged though and I didn't lose anything. I had slipped an Air Tag into one of the boxes. I could tell that every night during transit across the country to CA, the truck was in a trucking warehouse type facility. Never just on the side of the road or at a motel or something. It even picked up a ping while it was in the Pacific ocean! I guess a crew member with an iPhone walked close enough to the container. Same thing once it got here. It sat in the secure yard in Kawaihae until they brought it to the house.

I should note that it was only 360 cu ft of stuff, so not enough to fill a container anyway. The cost was around 6k. But even so, it was WAY less work than getting a container, getting everything INTO the container (they don't come with ramps or lift and are at least 5' off the ground). Securing the stuff in the container, then having to unpack and do the same thing in reverse in HI. No thanks. Just the thought of that wears me out. It was WELL worth the money considering the work it saved me.

Plus, do you REALLY need to bring a container's worth of stuff? I even question some of the stuff I brought!

[terracore]

It was some time ago, but we moved here from Alaska, and that's further away than BC.

Back then the cheapest way was to have the barge company deliver a shipping container to the house and self load it. A few days later they pick it up and a few weeks later it's at Hilo.

Considering your location it might be cheaper to have it trucked to Seattle to be barged. There are logistics companies that simplify this process but we saved a lot of money just by making a few phone calls.

As someone else mentioned the easiest way is to hire a moving company. Easy usually isn't cheap.

I don't know what your situation is but we asked the barge company if any of their containers were for sale, in case we wanted to keep it when we got here. There was no extra cost to have the option to buy it later because there was a seaworthy container for sale at our port. After we bought a home here we decided to buy the container and it has been an invaluable storage shed for our farm.

But think about if you really want to move all this stuff. Over the years we got rid of almost everything we brought here in that container. The container turned out to be more useful to us than the stuff inside it. The stuff we still have- could have been shipped at the box level cheaper.

[kalakoa]

The deck of a UPack is just a couple of inches off the ground. I made a little ramp out of some scrap wood and had no problem rolling a hand truck right into the container; there are plenty of tie points inside for strapping things down. Delivery/pickup is door-to-door, scheduling is "call when ready". You provide the locks. It was the nicest self-move I have ever experienced.

[Chas]

Yes. Good point. I looked into those and they looked really good. I would definitely check them out Gus. My stuff wouldn't fit though.