Moving to Hyndland

Entry for 23 January 2007:

As is turned out, the actual move was the easiest part of moving day. After weeks of organizing, shopping, do changes of address, packing, etc., the movers were finished by 10:30 this morning. (Not bad, considering that they started at the storage facility a bit after nine, and had to make a stop along the way to pick up two wardrobes in Broomhill.) Our mover, another colorful Glaswegian character named Hugh, decided to use two trucks and 5 helpers. While he and two of his crew were unloading the things from storage and the wardrobes, the rest of the crew packed up from Fulton Street and headed over to Hyndland, arriving shortly after the first crew finished unloading their truck. Having 5 people carting things upstairs and into our flat was somewhat dizzying, with guys arriving every 10 secs and asking where they should put things. We were somewhat dazed as we watched them drive off down Novar Drive, cheerfully waving goodbye to us.

Suddenly faced with many more hours than we had anticipated, we set ourselves an ambitious agenda of four tasks for the rest of the day: To make our bed, restock our groceries, clean out the rest of the old flat, and to get connected to the internet.

Making the bed turned out to be the most challenging, because, of course, this meant literally having to build it from the kit that IKEA Delivery had dropped off yesterday. Having previously assembled 4 IKEA chairs, we were only slightly prepared for this, because it turns out that making a bed is a lot more complicated that making a chair.

In addition, we immediately discovered that due to a printing error, Steps 1 & 2 out of 16 were missing. This required going through the remaining 12 steps in order to infer what had happened in the missing first two steps, and making a careful catalog of the all hardware useful in the later steps so we could determine what was left over for use in Steps 1 & 2. As it happened, this challenge was dwarfed in difficulty by the final two steps in which we were required to attach a set of mysterious metal brace pieces that form a web on the underside of the frame. Putting wood screws in upside down in unmarked pieces of wood was hard enough, but screwing together the two sliding metal pieces that make up each brace defeated us in the end. I probably spent an hour trying to getting the wee screws to thread through the metal pieces, and finally resorted to bracing the inadequately secured braces with bent paperclips. A dodgy set of braces if I even saw one! We'll just have to hope it is a Good Enough Home Assembled Bed and that is doesn't fall down on us someday.

In the middle of what turned out to be a 5 hour job of making the bed, we did manage to get lunch at the Peckhams Delicatessan on Clarence Street, to buy a microwave oven and a bunch of groceries, and to clear out the rest of our things form Fulton Street. It was around 6pm when we finished the bed by putting the slats in the frame, and the mattress on the slats, so we could make our bed in the usual sense.

I can testify to the success of this task, in that the new bed is: (a) very comfortable (no more springs poking back); (b) warm in spite of the central heating having gone off hours ago and refusing communicate with us about how to persuade it to come back on); (c) large (the size of a US queen-size bed); and (d) not too large for the our new bedroom, which also contains a desk, a large Art Deco wardrobe, two large dressers, a small bookshelf and a bunch of suitcases.

After we set up the computer, we were startled to discover that the computer’s internet connection came up right away, as if we hadn’t missed a beat. (We wondered why it took them 2 weeks to set it up in the first place!)

Thus, by 7, we had accomplished all of our four emergent tasks for moving day. However, dinner took us 3 hours, as we gradually excavated our cookware, dishes, utensils, etc. from various not-particularly well-labeled boxes, and tried to figure out how our new, oddly configured kitchen can be made to work for us. In the end, we produced a perfectly serviceable meal of omelet, steamed broccoli, bread and elaborate salad, which we ate while listening to an eclectic mix of folk and pop music on my iTunes Dinner Playlist, ranging from Nancy Griffith to the Beach Boys. Heaven!

So we are now truly Moved In, and are still marvelling at the sudden availability of so much Space. We seem to have double or triple as much room as we dinner at our last flat. It opens up all kinds of possibilities…