Good news in the email this morning. Our rental agreement has
come through in Nelson, and we have tenants for at least three months. It is at
a decent rate, though not as much as we had hoped as the market is very different
to that of February. The rent will pay for
the underestimations for our changes here! We slept very well. The new bed is
very comfortable and we are glad we got it rather than a standard folding bed (called
a clic-clac here) which tend to be smaller and always have lumps and bumps.
We finalised the scooter insurance this morning – about the same
price as our car of 10 times the value in Nelson. We stopped for a coffee at Bar Pablo before
lunch, and heard some Antipodean voices near us. It turned out to a two Aussie
couples who have also recently bought in Céret, a couple of hundred metres from
us. Nice to have a few recognisable accents.
After lunch was painting, assembling and fixtures. Karen
worked all afternoon on the shutters, completing them inside and out. I
replaced the door lock with a new one, replaced one of the convector heaters, installed
the shelf below the TV, and followed that with the TV wall mount. We really are
making progress, and our room is feeling like a proper room now. Getting things
off the floor and onto real tables rather than cartons is making a big
difference.
Given we’ve had three sub-standard IKEA items, we thought we’d
assemble the table to make sure it is OK before we write a letter to IKEA to
get the duds replaced. All went well. Their design and packaging is very clever,
even if their quality control seems to be a bit weak. We were surprised how
large the table was, even though we knew the exact dimensions. It is a
three-stage extending table, and even the unextended size is quite generous. We
might have been better with the next size down, but it isn’t available in the
birch finish we are sticking with, so no go.
Shifting around some of the IKEA boxes made us wonder how on
earth we had got them up the stairs on Thursday. They were wickedly heavy and
tough to move even a few metres. We could not believe we had got dozens of them
up 4 flights of stairs. We must have been really hyped up, or mad, or both.
