We recently bought a house and thinking whether it's worth to import most of the furniture/kitchen cabinets to Australia, these are too costly in Australia sometimes overpriced locally.
Is It Worth to Import Furniture or Kitchen Cabinets to Australia?
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You can buy flat pack Kitchen Cabinets from Bunnings or Ikea and screw them together yourself, it's not hard and saves a lot of money.
For your tapware, if you like German stuff like Grohe/HansGrohe, you could save a lot if you order that from Europe (eBay or Amazon). Since their GST is quite high, you would pay 19/21% less than what the locals pay which is enough to cover for shipping to Oz - you'll end up paying less than half of what they shops here would charge you. Just check with your plumber if he's happy to install, some can (rightfully) be quite difficult with anything that doesn't carry the WELS label even if you can demonstrate the product is identical.
Furniture/wood will need to be quarantined for up to 8 weeks by customs.
I imported a wooden day bed from bali and it was not quarantined , but it had to be fumigated.
How are you planning on sourcing the items overseas? If you need to take a trip overseas to find the items, that pretty much kills any savings.
If you're just buying online, it's probably fine - just pick a reputable site (check reviews, etc) and have a bailout plan (credit card insurance, paypal buyer protection, sell on gumtree/ebay) if you're not happy with the items.
My husband and I lived in Honk Kong for a few years. When we moved back to Melbourne, we had a couple of containers of our belongings shipped back, including many Chinese wooden furniture: tables, chairs, beside tables, sideboards, TV cabinets, chest of drawers…. A year or so after we arrived back in Melb, we starting to notice every single piece of our wooden furniture has some little cracks on the wood, Also, the drawers were becoming stuck, doors of cupboards couldn't shut/open properly. What happened was the wood has 'changed', due to the change in humidity (very humid in HK, dry in Melb.) The wood shrink/swell in different rate/directions. Some gaps at the joints are more than 5mm.
So lesson learned, I won’t be buying any wooden furniture from overseas again. Not worthy.
(Kitchen cabinets might be different, as they are not solid timber? But I’m no expert.)
Kitchen cabinets are universal, width is the same but length varies. The call them carcasses. Side panels, doors and kick panels change with styles, so do benchtops.
Try calling some local companies, if you can source some stuff yourself. Or do demolition you will save money and pay just for installation.
I imported a day bed from Bali. It cost more to move the bed off the ship in fremantle to a warehouse in welshpool, than it did to get it all the way to fremantle.
If it's an expensive timber, perhaps, but the import duties and customs issues alone would make this a pain. Are you saving a few hundred dollars? Is your time stuffing around actually worth it for a comparative local product? What about installation? What if the sizes are wrong (from overseas) or it's delayed weeks?
If these are things you can manage, maybe you can save a few bucks. IMO, there's too many little bits that could go wrong (e.g. damage, size, wrong colour, wrong timber, misunderstandings, time) to warrant it.