Moving

Andrew here.  I'm finally getting around to posting about the move we got to endure last month.  Most of the trauma has faded by now, fortunately, but with it many of the details as well.  So I'll do my best to remember what I can.  Please enjoy it in all its painful glory.  These pics here are from the night before we moved.  Please note Cat really getting in on the action.  She was a really, really, really big help.

Without delving too much into what went into actually finding the flat, we ultimately decided on a place right down the street from my office, which literally cut my commute in half (10 minutes on foot, down to 5)!  So that was nice.  The idea was to sign the lease a few days before the beginning of October, and the landlord would let us start the move but not charge us for those few days.  In theory this should have worked great.  The problems were not forseen, but were myriad.

First of all, the flat was brand new.  As in, water had never even run through the pipes, the boiler had never been used, ditto the radiators, the gas had never been turned on, no phone ever installed, and no juice had ever run through the wiring.  I showed up to the flat the day before we were going to move the bulk of our things to let the cleaning lady in, as well as the guy to hook up the electricity.  Neither of these people showed up.  Water was also supposed to be turned on the the day before, but no dice.  Nevermind gas and phone.  So I swept out one of the rooms (what was ulitmately to become the baby/guest room) so we could pile all our stuff in it and not have to reschedule the moving van.  But to make matters worse, as I walked through the flat to check everything out I noticed the bathroom smelled a little musty.  I opened the window to let it air out and felt something drip on my arm, and realised there was a nice, steady drip in the ceiling, running down the wall, mirror, all over the floor, etc.  This was just the first of many, many leaks.  I couldn't get hold of anyone that day to come and fix it, so I figured it would have to wait until Monday.  In theory everything else (except phone) was supposed to be hooked up at the end of the weekend, so at this point I wasn't TOO worried about everything going as planned.  How naive of me.  (Oh yeah, I had also brought over a couple of crates of most of our refrigerated goods to put in the fridge, which obviously wasn't going to happen since we still had no electricity, so I had to take them all over to the office and dump them in the fridge in the kitchen.  So classy).

The move itself went pretty well.  I hired a van and a couple of guys to help me manage the stuff.  We had very little furniture, as we were moving from a furnished flat, but there was no way I was going to carry all of our stuff up and down all 81 stairs by myself.  All told it took about 2 hours to load and unload the van, and this took care of most of our stuff.  This was the ONLY thing that went smoothly in the whole ordeal.  Unfortunately, since the flat wasn't exactly ready to move in we still had to leave a substantial amount of stuff in the old place so we could continue to live there.  So while most of the stuff was already moved, for the next 4 days I still took a minimum of two loads of junk, as it became available, from the old flat to the new one, either hauling it on a dolly or carrying it on my back like a hobo.  Jumping ahead several days, our very last load consisted of mostly cleaning supplies that I was hauling on the trolly.  Marie pointed out that I looked like a cleaning hobo, but not a stabbing hobo, which in turn prompeted me to begin singing "just can't beat the hobo liiiiife.....cleanin' stuff with my hooobooo wiiiiiiiiiife."  Those unfamiliar with The Simpsons will probably be more confused--but only slightly less entertained--than those who get the reference.  Anyways, I was mighty sick of all those stupid stairs.  Very glad to now just be on the 1st floor...and have a lift as well.

Over the next several days, I spent many an hour struggling to get the boiler and radiators connected and working, getting the water turned on, the lady's tub upstairs fixed, and getting someone in to clean as was promised.  The latter was pretty much a joke, which I immediately knew was going to be the case when she showed up empty-handed and asked where my cleaning supplies were.  Nothing happened without a minimum of 3 phone calls, often in Spanish, and several trips to the flat.  I was constantly dropping everything at work and running over on a moment's notice because someone was showing up immediately and I needed to be there to let them in.

After finally getting all the utilities turned on several days late, we were finally ready to go to IKEA and spend a whole lot of money.  Seriously.  Over the past month, I personally have kept IKEA from feeling the effects of the economic downturn, and I now live in the 2009 catalogue.  The night we purchased the bulk of the items I cheaped out at the last minute.  After paying several, several hundreds of Euros, when paying for shipping I opted to NOT pay the final 12 Euros that would require them to move the stuff all the way up to the flat, instead of just leaving it at the bottom of the building.  The couch fit in the lift with literally a centimetre to spare on the top, as I put it on its end and pushed it in.  I told myself I was ridiculous for doing something like that, but the next week when we went back and bought another wave of stuff, I did the same thing again.  On the other hand I saved a total of 24 Euros, and am now a rippling mass of knotted muscle.  At least my back is.  It was full of knots anyway.  Pretty much the same thing.

We moved in for good the day after the first IKEA trip (also a couple of days later than we had planned, but my old landlord was good enough to not charge me for the time).  Without going into details, the bed we were planning on buying turned out to not be a bed at all, so we just had a mattress sitting on the floor.  "Mattress" might be giving it too much credit, too.  We finally found a frame to fit our mattress (the frame is fixed and doesn't collapse, although for some reason you have to buy the frame and the legs separately...), but at a department store on the other side of town.  It wouldn't fit in a taxi or any other conventional means of transportation...so naturally, I thought to myself "why not just take this puppy on the metro?"  I'm going to assume that most readers of this blog have all had the pleasure of carrying a bed halfway across Barcelona on the subway system, so I'm sure I don't need to explain to you the perils involved in such a task.  Long story short....I was extremely lucky and will never ever do anything that stupid again.  Actually I also carried a cabinet from that same store on the metro the following week that was even heavier than the bed and gave me a heart-attack (Nate and Claudia know about my heart-attacks), but other than THAT I'll never do anything so stupid again.

About a day after moving in, we somehow managed to flood the basement in our building by simply using water like normal, because something wasn't connected right in the first place.  That was finally fixed, and was probably the largest leak in a pantheon of leaks that has included, to date:  a leaky ceiling, a flooded basement, two leaky sinks, a leaky radiator, and a leaky boiler (twice).  Oh, and Marie reminds me that the first time we turned on the washer it flooded the kitchen floor.  Of these, all have been reparied except for the radiator (just when I think I've gotten it as tight as it can go, I turn the radiators on and it starts leaking again) and one big Mystery Leak.  We noticed a few weeks ago that the kitchen floor looks water-damaged, whereas it hadn't appeared so in the past.  Best I can figure is that the tub--on the other side of the wall--wasn't properly sealed and now when we shower, water is getting in and coming up through the kitchen floor.  I would just seal it in myself, but the landlord prefers to have the Hungarian handyman take care of it.  This is the guy who, when we discovered one of the leaky sinks, shrugged and said (in English) "Made in Spain.  Eh?"  Needless to say, I have nothing but confidence in Kiril's abilities.

I'm not even scratching the surface on how difficult it was to get the phone connected.  Despite the fact that the whole flat has been wired for telephone, and that the technician could clearly see how everyone else in the building has had their phone connected, his little magic wand wasn't telling him what he wanted to hear and I ultimately just told him to drill a hole in the wall (Spanish-style) and do whatever it takes to give me telephone.  I'm simplifying somewhat, as the whole process took over 2 weeks.  But hopefully you get the idea.  Now we have at least 4 phone outlets throughout the flat that are completely useless.  Kiril (Hungarian Handyman) looked at them and told me he had never seen anything like it.  I have, of course, since it's how EVERY HOME, APARTMENT, AND OFFICE is wired in the US.  Oh well.  I now have a phone and wireless router sitting on the floor beside the couch where he drilled the hole, but at least I also have DSL again.

Well, congratulations for anyone who made it this far.  I did not proof read either, which may or may not be apparent.  As a reward for reading the whole thing, please enjoy this collection of pics from the new flat.