May
21
Written by:
David Strickland
5/21/2007 10:33 AM
Well this last week we got our boxes. 4 Large Gaylord boxes along with 8 international export pallets. Also got a quote for shipping the whole thing. As it sits at the moment the quote I got to ship from U.S. to India was $350 for the first Cubic Meter $150 for each additional meter. This is actually a lot less then we originally thought it would be. We have 3 pallets of items already packaged that we know we have to ship. Training materials books etc. We didn't think we'd be able to ship much else because we figured it would be cost prohibitive. In the end we found that we couldn't replace things as cheaply as we could ship them. We aren't exactly sure what customs is going to run us on all this. It's all used stuff that is going into the house or orphanage but we'll have to see.
It's going to take about a month to get our stuff to India so we'll have to ship it out in the begining of July. Another lesson I stumbled across in this process was wood. Originally I planned on building some boxes out of plywood and shiping that way. I found out that to ship wood internationally it has to be specially treated and marked and gets real expensive. This goes for pallets as well. The cheapest approach is to use cardboard boxes on single use plasic pallets. In the end It cost us about $200 for 4 48 x 40 x 36 gaylord boxes. 8 smaller boxes and 8 international single use pallets.