I loathe stairs

So I bought a place! Exciting stuff, well until I had to move. Unfortunately timing meant that I was due back on a plane a mere 5 days after I got the keys to my castle. In that time I had to do all the legal stuff to take ownership, we had to move our belongings, buy some furniture, and ensure we cleaned up the rental apartment to hand back.

I thought it would be a breeze. I mean, I had rented a full furnished apartment, so I only had no furniture to move. And how long does it take to clean an apartment. And furniture should be a quick Ikea trip.

Well I was wrong on all fronts.

Somehow I had managed to collect a lot of stuff in my 8 months. And it took many boxes to pack it all up. Mirjam has only a small car, so we spent several days simply ferrying these boxes from the rental apartment to our new home. Some days we worked flat out moving from 9am to 10pm. It was tough.

And then there were the stairs. Oh how I loathed those stairs. The rental apartment was on the second floor of the building and my new apartmentw as on the third floor. So I did a lot of carrying heavy boxes up and down stairs. And boy it was tough. After a few days of it my back was killing me and I couldn’t lift another thing.

Next was the furniture. To start, I had a bed that was held in storage after being shipped from Australia. And whilst it was a typical queen size bed for Australia, it is not so typical for the small dutch apartments. You see, in Holland stair cases are not usually very wide. So my bed didn’t fit up the stairs. All other options were exhausted, such as hoisting it up through the window. But there was no way to get a queen size bed up to the apartment. The solution, I was told by the moving company, was to saw it in half. I thought that was a joke, and so had a laugh, but no they were serious. After some serious consideration, it was the only option. And they promised to do a good job to put it back together.

So a handyman arrived to my apartment, a few minutes of sawing, and the bed was in two. The bed made it up the stairs, and shortly later it was put back together with some nails and extra wooden supports. All seems to be fine so far, and a bedding disaster avoided.

As for the other furniture, Mirjam and I raided Ikea, and being exhausted after the monstrous move, last thing I wanted to do was put furniture together. But we needed at least a dinning table, since this evening we had some friends coming over “for dinner”. It was funny as I was still putting the table together when they arrived. As I constructed the table, the girls constructed the meal, and I made it moments before the meal was served. Talk about “just in time inventory”.

As for the rest, we simply ran out of time. I ordered a few essentials such as washing machine, oven, TV. But the otherwise the apartment is still a bit bare. But Mirjam and I had fun in our simple setting, surrounded by mountains of half unpacked boxes. And then I had to depart, leaving poor Mirjam with the chaos. Not an ideal start to our new place, but nonetheless we had moved in. Next, we had to make it our home. But that would wait until next month.