Last box standing

Last weekend saw us pass a major milestone at Swiss Cottage. The last box of our belongings was finally given a permenant home in our new flat. This event was made possible thanks (yet again) to the miracle of IKEA and it's storage solutions. We still have a couple of boxes filled with CDs and DVDs, but all of the large items shipped from Australia actually have a real home in London.

This link gives you an idea of the storage units we've assembled in the main living room:

IKEA link 1

The last of our new home furnishing purchases are also due over the next week or so. With luck our suite of home office furniture will arrive this Thursday and our new bed some time next week. The story of our new bed is rather amusing. Some of you will recall that Garry and I bought two bulky leather sofas last year. To refresh your memory, here's a picture:

Given this bulk, we used their measurements to help short list flats we could to lease. Basically, if we couldn't fit our sofas into a flat it was immediately struck from the list. All sorts of dimensions were considered, including access points to each house. Garry even measured up the stairwell in our Swiss Cottage building before we finally signed the lease. However, neither of us thought to measure the rigid, Queen-size, bed-base before moving in.

Needless to say, when moving day came, the base wouldn't fit up the stairwell and we were forced to abandon it. It was one of several items we discarded that day. Nobody lifted an eyebrow as it seems the removalists have this happen all the time in London. On the flip side, our move to London has proven well timed as we've managed to secure terrific deals on replacement furniture items thanks to the post-Christmas sales. Our home office was at least 40% cheaper than normal and the new bed, close to half price.

Now, I need to be careful here, as I'd hate people to get the impression that our sofas fitted into our new home with ease. They didn't. It took almost 20 minutes to work out how to get the first sofa up two flights of narrow, twisting stairway. In the end we asked our neighbours to open their front door before we successfully angled the sofas around a particularly tight corner.

In the midst of all this drama we managed to lock our neighbour out of his apartment whilst he was standing in his pyjamas, suffering a dose of winter flu. The situation was further complicated by the fact that his wife was out, he wasn't carrying a mobile phone and didn't have his key to hand. Even worse, a small child was locked inside. Imagine this scene; within minutes we're standing on the landing with a sofa wedged in the stairway, with a sick and bewildered man beside us listening to the sounds of his distraught toddler locked inside. Fortunately, we share the same landlord so I was able to make a call and relay a message to his wife, who promptly returned home.

It's great to have a real home again.

Now there's just the insurance to sort out, the broadband access to arrange, the off-street parking to find, the cleaner to hire, the UK credit cards to apply for, the driving licences to transfer and on it goes. How much further could modern life be from cavemen days?