Moving Into Merwekade

This weekend we moved into our new apartment. Here are some of the highlights:

• Four appliances came Friday morning. I succeeded in getting them out of the packaging, but after that I reached the limits of my usefulness.
• Ann’s dad and Mieke came about around 11:00am to help us out. Since Ann’s dad actually knows all the appropriate names for the tools and their uses this was a decidedly large help.
• Four pallets of IKEA furniture came Satruday too. The delivery guys climbed six steps to get into the building, five steps to get to our door, came in, and then refused to carry the stuff the remaining seven steps to the living room (our apartment is split level). They said I only paid for ground floor delivery. I was equal parts incredulous and disgusted. I carried the damn sofas, carpet, entertainment center, dinner table and end tables up the seven steps myself. Counting loudly as I did so.
• Andre drove us to IKEA to purchase even more stuff. We spent an hour in the lighting department alone. I won on the halogen lights for the kitchen but had to concede the hallway, office, and guest bedroom lamps. Since the kitchen has the most electoral college votes though I am declaring victory.
• The Swedish meatballs and ligonberry sauce were yummy for a third time in ten days.
• We lost Mieke in the parking lot of IKEA. We found her though. Still not sure if Andre was serious when he said, “Don’t worry, she’ll find her way back.” (IKEA is 20 minutes away by car.)
• While forcing apart the pieces of a pre-IKEA cheapo closet left in our apartment that was just too ugly to bear, the sides fell apart and three heavy shelves fell almost directly on top of Andre’s head. Thankfully only one of them grazed his hand. That event signaled our move into the dinner portion of the event.
• Monday the 1st our shipment from the states came. Ann was sick all day and as a result I let the delivery guys off the hook. They were supposed to unpack all the boxes, but I didn’t want to disturb Ann, who was sleeping, so I told them we would do it later.
• You’d be amazed how much time it takes to unwrap boxes and boxes of plate ware and kitchen stuff.
• We found our rice cooker and coffee machine. Neither of which work on 220 voltage. Apparently, “Don’t pack anything electrical” was too hard to understand.
• Even the TV was uncooperative. It auto-detected about eight channels. Only half of them with sound. All of them different from the channels that we had in the company apartment. After reprogramming it eventually got all 30 channels it was supposed to.

So now we are more or less installed in the new place. We slept for the first time in our own bed last night (which is amazingly large and soft, just as we remembered it). We, of course, need more stuff from IKEA (you’d think that place sold heroin instead of furniture).

But things are moving along and Ann and I are looking forward to having a place to call ‘home’ for a little while that has such a great view and is in the old part of town. The bathroom and the kitchen look great after the renovations, and the place will look even better after we dig out from under all the cardboard boxes and packing paper.