Cut for unnecessary whinging.
So, on Thursday, we shall be in our new place. It’s compact and bijou, as they say, and so this morning I spent a relaxing couple of hours with an electrician as he installed the 50A/250V socket on the outside of the building. Shiny, it was, unfortunately, it preceeded a day which hasn’t left me feeling inspiringly excited about my success.
The entire weekend was, in the end, a raging success. Well. Sort of.
See, we spent Saturday getting slowly fed up and frustrated with the available mattresses and sofas in the Olympia area. I forget, because US cities sprawl so, that Olympia (+Lacey+Tumwater) is actually 1/4th the size of Bristol – population wise. So while it feels big, the actual variety of stores here is much smaller than I’m used to. And despite the ecofriendly nature, lefty liberal nature of the place, we just couldn’t find what we wanted.
We found a sofa we didn’t dislike. I mean, it was ‘quite nice’. And it was made in Mexico, at least, not China, which is where all the other ones we liked were made.
But it wasn’t…we didn’t love it.
So after much fernangling, and some research on Sunday morning, we discovered a few places we liked the look of…in Portland. And after a small amount of debate, we decided that the 2.5 hour journey was worth it – and would be just fine…. so we hopped into Mica (the insight) and flew the 120 odd miles down to Portland. And we headed into a futon store where we tried the cheapest, then the one we were intending to buy….and then made the mistake of laying on the model up.
Oh you can see where this is going, can’t you.
So then, having concluded that we were going to buy the mattress futon we’d concluded was too expensive before we left, we arranged to call them today and headed over to What’s New? where we proceeded to rapidly test about 40 sofas in quick succession (and a number of rather nice chairs). Having found the one we wanted, we then arranged to order it in the colour we wanted, before heading out to see Nikki and Kate.
So that was all quite nice. The only slight inconvenience coming away from the weekend is that the Sofa’s not going to arrive for… 4-6 weeks. Ugh. But that’s what you get for locally made, custom furniture. You can pay extra for a rush job, but we weren’t quite willing to do that.
So then this morning I headed over to our to-be-new-place, and met the electrician who added in the requisite charging point socket. 250 shiny volts at up to 50A. Mnyum.
At the same time I called up the futon place – and they attempted to come up with a shipping quote for the bed frame and mattress. Which…took a while. So once the socket was installed I pootled home, stopping en-route to try and sort out the glass top for our coffee table.
The guy who sold it to us said $60 should see us equipped with a coffee table top.
…the glass place said “$71 plus tax”, which I make around $80, which is quite irritating.
…which kinda put a crimp on my already tired brain’s mood, and then the discovery that adding the bed-frame added over $100 to the shipping cost (so it’s cheaper to get the bed frame locally, which is good – except that it’s made in Malaysia anyway). And that the original 3-5 days for the mattress has become one week (which is, I suppose, 5 business days) – before delivery. Which is, well, it’s disappointing. I don’t really want to sleep on an airbed for 5 days. But I also don’t really want to pay rent on a place we’re not living. And I’m quite excited to unpack some of our stuff. But the challenge of coordinating things has taken some of the sheen off.
Which is ridiculously grumpy of me, and most of that is down to the fact we didn’t get back until after 2200 yesterday, and then needed to do some errandy things so didn’t get to bed until 2330.
And partly it’s grumpyness because I wanted to be done with picking things, and now we have to stare at bedframes we’re not deeply excited by. There are bed frames we really like, but they’re not in the price range that we’re looking for at the moment.
Of course this is all underlayed by frustration about the house, and about lack of progress there. And worrying about whether I’ll be a good teacher in my new job. Which is, in reality, what this is all really about. Feh.
Anyhow, I should stop whinging.
