I am hoping to do a self-pack on this end to save money, and I suppose I'll have to hire movers on the Irish side to do something similar as to the unpacking and getting it to West Cork.   

Just wondering if folks would be kind enough to provide any updated information they have on this topic. Interested in moving costs from Boston to Clare. Interested in people's experiences of shipping companies they used. 

John

This is wonderful to read and answers so many of my questionsl But.... what was the final cost for everything, if I can be so bold as to ask.

Kind regards,

Michael Curran

"Shipping success! Although we moved here a year and a half ago, we were not able to pack up and ship most of our belongings until recently. We are finally reunited with our books, music, furniture, mementos, and papers from my research career at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I thought I might explain the process for others who are shipping belongings from the US to Ireland. We booked a 20' FCL (full container load) that was actually only about half full, with UpakWeShip. This was about half the price quoted by Careline. We hired movers on each end to load the container and to unload it, to save our backs. It is especially difficult to get things in and out of shipping containers because there is no ramp or lift gate on their tractor-trailers. There were minor snafus with the container truckers on both ends. In Atlanta, he arrived 1:45 late, but the movers kept busy staging our stuff, which had to be brought down from the 3rd floor of a storage facility. In Dundalk, the trucker was right on time...sort of. It took him an extra half an hour to figure out how to get up our slightly tricky driveway. He was a bit new to big rigs, I think, and did not speak English well so my and the movers' instructions were not followed. As a result the movers had to carry things for 50m to our door. They finally did convince the driver to back to our door, which he did no problem, and then things went much faster. It was all done in under 2 hours. The most pleasantly surprising thing is that the whole journey from Atlanta to Dublin (via Rotterdam, Netherlands) took just over a month. Also good news was that Customs in Ireland allowed us to use the Transfer of Residence exclusion from duties or taxes, even though it was past one year (I had doctor notes to explain why we could not travel back to Atlanta until recently). Pete Nash at UpakWeShip was very attentive to our questions via email, as were his two layers of agents, one in the UK (Andy Fane) and one in Dublin (Pat McGowan). It was fun to track our shipping container and vessel (at http://www.track-trace.com/container and https://www.marinetraffic.com/), so if you ship, be sure to make a note of the container's number. We hung desiccant bags in the container to guard against mold or damp problems, and tied everything down well with ratchet straps. It was in fine shape upon arrival. Our padlock and the numbered shipping bolt were still on the door, so no one had opened it for inspection. That may be thanks to us putting a LOT of work into filling out a very detailed inventory of every single box for our customs paperwork. 
All in all, this complex process went very well. If you have any questions, post them below"

Has anyone ever used the UPakWeShip company/service for a FCL? 

Also, has anyone ever asked PODS whether a container/truck can be backed up to their warehouse bay so a POD could be unloaded straight into a shipping container?   

Because I'm packing my boxes myself, am I crazy to think I could save some money by hiring some movers to help me load the container myself and save some money that way?  Although, because a 2-hour loading window will go very quickly, I would imagine I would need a large group of muscle-laden fellows moving & stacking the boxes.    

Hi Susan, 

We used UpakWeShip a few months ago and were very, very happy with them. I'm trying to find if we wrote a review here about the experience....

P.S where do you find a large group of muscle-laden fellows? :) Chippendales :)