I feel like I'm a little late jumping in here, but here it goes ...
I was ambivalent about getting the container. I thought too about just burning the house down and starting anew in NZ rather than forking out $10K to move all my stuff. Well, my wife was insistent upon brining the bedroom furniture, as it was a wedding gift from her grandmother. So, container it was.
For insurance purposes, everything we put into the container had to be inventoried and valued. Even after getting rid of *a lot* of stuff, we still had nearly $50K worth of items in there--and that is low-balling the value of the 20 cartons of books that I included!
It may be wise to actually sit down and figure out what your gear is worth, making a list and giving a value to all the stuff you own, then deciding if a container is right for you or not.
BTW, here are some pics. You can see that we used about 85% of the 20' container.
Oh, and here are the two boys who are going to destroy whatever is left of NZ after Dawn gets finished ...
