Breakables: Take it or leave it?

[Hanneke12345]

We are still deciding if we should use a moving cube or container to move our most sentimental things to Australia. Have anyone ever taken breakables over like photoframes with glass in front, glass salad bowls, decanters etc?

Or is this not recommended? I am worried that all of it will just break.  We got really nice glassware for our wedding as gifts and would really like to take this with us. 

[ChrisH]

We brought over everything we had, including a couple of pretty big picture frames and artworks with glass in front of them.  We didn't have a single breakage with breakware, not even our champagne glasses.

 

We only had one smaller picture where the glass cracked.

[Hanneke12345]

That is good news. Which shipping company did you use? 

[RedPanda]

We brought over everything we wanted to keep, including lots of glasses, vases, bowls, a display cabinet with glass panels and glass shelves. In the whole lot we had one big bowl that broke, and the biggest of the glass panels for the cabinet got here in a state that could only be described as: High irritant glitter - do not allow near the house. So we didn't. Insurance replaced the glass panel. We didn't claim for the bowl. One of our big picture frames came apart, but we'd been wanting to replace it for ages and just didn't know how to disassemble it before we moved.

So my advice would be bring it all if you want to. Insure it if you think it's valuable.

Professional movers are quite good at what they do. The amount of packing paper we had (still have, cause we're hoarders like that  ) is rather impressive, but it served its purpose.

[RedPanda]

We used Crown.

[ChrisH]

1 hour ago, Hanneke12345 said:

That is good news. Which shipping company did you use? 

Kings International

[greggle]

Yes, bring them! Having your own things around you really helps you settle. For the breakables you can crate them ... we bought a huge mirror and it survived the trip in a crate. If you use a removal company supervise the packing of those valuable items - I found that the packers that we had did not do a very good job because while they wrapped things, they put them into a large box loose so that they could still move around. Putting things into bubble wrapping and then, smaller boxes first (for example, shoe boxes) means that they won't roll about in the larger boxes. I imagine that things move around quite a bit in a container as its loaded and unloaded.

[wonderer]

We had no damage on fragile or glass stuff, which included an antique bookcase with fragile lead glass panels, large mirror that we didn't get crated (as they suggested) nor did we crate our large TV or Mac or other monitors. 

We did have damage to an office chair wheel (which felt random) and they put our camping battery box on it's side in storage (in Aus), so we lost that and had cosmetic damage to our cd player and a camping chair as a result of the leaking acid. Oh and our microwave.

We used British international.

 

Choosing a company affects how they pack on that side which is important, but you are there to keep an eye. On this side there are contractors and that's the weakest link in the whole process, in my opinion.

 

We decided to not take insurance as it is very expensive and in our case it was fine, as our losses did not even come close to what we would have paid.
(We are rather sentimental and insurance could anyway not replace the piece with it's story behind it.)

 

We used the money instead to buy a robotic vacuum cleaner and a few other 'nice to haves' to make our lives easier, which we are rather chuffed with, and enjoy a lot.