things that went wrong this weekend in the process of moving to Knypplinge at last

1. Friday the city water guy FINALLY installed a new water meter, which takes like ten minutes and which we've been waiting for over a month for. Two of the contractor's guys turned the water on, checked the pressure, and were then supposed to simply put a kitchen and a bathroom sink onto their respective counters and hook them up with the water and with a drain pipe. But right away they found out that the bathroom sink wouldn't fit onto its counter. One of the guys had to go try to buy another cabinet to go under the recently-purchased sink and didn't make it back before the end of the day: no bathroom sink. The other guy was missing a part and couldn't finish putting the kitchen sink in: no kitchen sink. There were a number of tools and bits of garbage strewn through the hallway and kitchen, where we needed to clean thoroughly before we could move.



2. Saturday morning one of the guys came back on his day off to hook up the kitchen sink so that at least we would have running water so we could move after all. He tidied all their tools away to one corner of the kitchen, but it's a small kitchen and the tools became a bit of a barrier. He also didn't have the stuff to caulk the sunken sink into the laminate countertop, so while we were able to use it Saturday and Sunday, water from around the edges was leaking down into the cabinet the whole time. We've been wiping it up obsessively.



3. Saturday, then, instead of Friday, we swept and dusted and mopped and washed all the surfaces in the kitchen and all the floors we were able to clean and then moved the last stuff with which we'd been camping (about one minivan full of clothes and toiletries and bedding) and MIL's futon sofa bed on which we'd been sleeping -
   
   

   OK, pause there. I've moved and assembled plenty of futons in my time. This one didn't have any way to take it apart, nor any way to fold it completely up to make it flat, nor any way to lock it in position so it could be safely moved around??? And it was really heavy??? We had to zip tie the frame into the sofa position just to be able to move it through a doorway. Of course it also needs three mattresses, because why not. And what is the point of something BEING a futon of it's bulky, heavy, and unwieldy? You might as well buy an actual sleeper sofa. I'm kinda shocked that this ever came from Ikea.

   
   
   - and MIL's desk - because she owns a desk made of solid birch plywood that literally weighs so much that the two of us could only lift it a couple of inches off the floor OR tilt it up at one end with the other on the floor still. Like it took both of us to even TILT it. I'm a 100 lb weakling, yes, but waxjism is pure hearty farm girl stock with a proper sturdy build and can carry things and lift things, evolved specifically for manhandling livestock and doing whatever it is farm owners did on pre-modern farms! This desk isn't even large! And BIL or her friend the handyman could've moved it for her at any time over the past 2 months while we knew this was happening, but somehow somebody thought it was convenient to leave it there doing essentially nothing in the kitchen this whole time for me and Wax to move without help at the last minute. And all the dishes and pots and pans and drawers from her kitchen, which included such useful everyday items as an antique apothecary's scale and a drawer full of nothing but seashells and loose disposable bamboo skewers. The only reason her enormous collection of useless antique multiple-gallon empty glass bottles had already been moved was because Wax and I had to take them from on top of the fridge ourselves when the BB started jumping up there and playing among them. (Did I mention that on the earlier actual moving day when we took her stuff out of the flat, the three largest and heaviest pieces of antique furniture also hadn't been emptied because she either 'forgot there was stuff in [that enormous dresser in the hallway]' or 'didn't know if it would be easier to move it full of stuff (and with the doors/drawers still in place but not fastened in any way!!)'. This was after we'd had a month to pack at leisure.



4. With a bunch of trips we eventually got us and all our pets here on Saturday evening, but unfortunately, we were starving and the new oven hadn't ever been turned on. If you've ever dealt with a new oven, you know that you have to wash the inside of it, then turn it on and let all the nasty chemical smell burn out, then wash the inside of it again. So we could not make a frozen pizza as planned. It took several hours to set up a temporary bunny enclosure and unpack enough in the kitchen to clear space to feed the cats and us.



5. Another thing that fell by the wayside was preparing the spot where the washing machine is going to be hooked up in the garage - the cement of the floor is old and a bit cracked, which is unacceptable for under MIL's washing machine, so we have to wait for the floor to be resurfaced. So we will need to go back to the now-mostly-emptied flat (we still have a week to clean it) to do laundry. Our washing machine is to go in the 2nd of the bathroms on our side on the contractors' list, so they have quite a few other things to do before it can be put in.



6. Sunday I started on the oven after breakfast and Wax started attaching a modem to the newly-installed cable internet. With the sink un-caulked and smaller than an oven tray, I had to wash them in a plastic bin in the bathroom (which doesn't have a sink at all). Wax discovered that both OUR basically-new modem and MIL's basically-new modem can't make the internet work right in the sense of delivering the internet through the network cables and also making a working Wifi LAN. She spent almost all day on it and we eventually gave up on having wifi and only got the modem to work by restoring it to factory settings. The oven is ready to work though. And I discovered the dishwasher isn't hooked up - water or electricity. Makes sense I guess, since it connects to the sink and they got interrupted halfway through.



7. We went to the grocery store after that, but had to go to two stores because the first one didn't have any light fixtures and we were missing one. We had dinner at MIL's summer cottage thanks to the oven and dishwasher issues, and then she came back here with us although nobody asked me first and I was overstimulated to the point of emotional instability and desperately in need of alone time, and then stood over our shoulders and spent what felt like several hours making people-who-don't-know-what-a-firewall-or-a-modem-is-level 'suggestions' such as "Why don't you just put it back the way it was at my old flat?" and "The light is blinking". And then while she was sitting down on a footstool, she threw out her back. She managed to walk to her car again eventually with the aid of her Nordic walking sticks, but I doubt she can go anywhere today (or should).



8. The workers are here and they're on the other side of a plastic zipper door, so the dust stays over there and the cats over here. But unfortunately, once even one of them arrived a bit after 7:30, Snookums became so upset and restless that I couldn't get any more sleep either, even though no power tools were used at first. Also they are going to have to fix the kitchen and bathroom sinks, still. And the dishwasher.

Things can always be worse, but flooded basement full of valuable antiques is pretty bad

I definitely spoke too soon before.

A pipe exploded in our basement and gushed water at full pressure for at least half an hour, filling the utility and sauna side of the basement with about a foot of water and spraying a good inch deep in the garage, which was full of all MIL's furniture. A total of 5 plumbers and builders were here for about five hours draining it, which was also how long we spent carrying all that stuff out (mostly it's in the boat shed, which has such a powerful mildew smell that just standing near it can make me cough so, you know, great, but the most valuable and sensitive stuff is here crammed in among our belongings where it definitely doesn't fit).

Tomorrow they'll be back to dry it with more equipment, and I'll start over from scratch trying to create enough space for a bunny run (I had done this morning, but it's now full of the aforementioned valuable and sensitive stuff).

The internet also stopped working, but hopefully it just blew a fuse or something.

Thanks to the Vacation from Hell, though, I was still able to cheer up a bit with the beautiful reflection that "At least no one's in a coma, and we aren't in France with no fluent French speakers!"