Hi Littlewing,
My hubby & I migrated from SF to Christchurch earlier this year. Having acquired well-loved belongings for the last 15+ years, and believing we were moving for the long haul, we decided to ship our things. We ended up filling 3/4 of a 40' container. Went with Allied International as our shipping folks. Living in the city in a 3rd floor flat precluded us from doing this uber cheaply, so we paid for full-service end-to-end shipping -- they came to the house over 2 days, packed everything, hauled it into two 20' trucks, brought it to the Oakland docks, loaded it into a 40' container and sailed it to the nearest harbour to Christchurch which is Lyttleton Harbor, about 15 minutes away. From Lyttelton they brought the container to the warehouse, unloaded, and reloaded into 2 trucks, and delivered to our house. Total cost about $12,000 USD which was WAY cheaper than us having to replace everything once we got here. Pack date to delivery date took about 11 - 12 weeks, actual sailing time was much less, but it took a couple of weeks on NZ side to go through inspections and schedule delivery.

If you're migrating here and want more info, you should check out the yahoo group, expats-in-new-zealand. Good bunch of folk.
groups.yahoo.com/group/Exp...w-Zealand/

Cheers,
Kathy

If you do ship, make sure to kick in the extra bucks and insure for mold. Our stuff did, in fact, get damaged by mold. Luckily, the insurance more than paid to replace the few items that were damaged.