Louisa Simmonds

NC was super helpful on the day

It is somewhat ironic that after weeks of persuading Kurt to allow us to buy him a bed base for his mattress so that our house no longer resembles a student house, our own base refused to bend those extra ten degrees necessary to get it up the stairs of our new house. I blame the sketchiest/cheapest removalists I have ever come across – and we’ve come across a few – but it doesn’t help that our bed base is obviously the only design not to come apart with the only Allen key size you don’t have when you need it.

‘It’s never going up the stairs,’ is a phrase I have become accustomed to in our career of house moves and in my own job of styling property for sale, and ordinarily, I would have begged to differ with them. However, having watched the sweat pour off our three burly lads as they managed to bend a double base in half, I had to accept with sadness that they had a point. There was no way that the only piece of furniture in our house not to originate from IKEA was going around that annoying little bend at the bottom of the stairs. I avoided the mental calculations of what that was going to cost us on top of the additional hours of trying to squeeze it past the banister, as well as the blame and weary acceptance in the eyes of the old man.

“Moving house” isn’t cheap when it turns out the truck is not big enough to accommodate everything in one load because some knob-end at Head Office skipped school on the day they learned how to calculate the volume of a 3D shape. Nor is it cheap when your team of “professionals” tear into the timber floors of your old house with the sharp corner of a box, hours prior to the final inspection with the agent.

I should have known as soon as one of them turned up in flip-flops (thongs) that this was more a merry band of amateurs rather than consummate professionals, who had more enthusiasm for nicotine than lifting.

Much to the old man’s chagrin, the garage has already evolved into a dumping ground storage area for all furniture that wouldn’t go up the stairs or hasn’t met the exacting requirements of my coastal theme. It is a large space, fortunately, but I secretly suspect that the old man had been counting on it as his new “shed” from the extensive list of strict rules that I found shredded in the bin at the end of the day.

Once again, I was forced to negotiate sexual favors for the rights of the artificial Christmas tree.

He was very quiet at the end of the day and I swear I saw him throw up in his mouth a little the one time he dared peer down the stairs into his new furniture showroom of “good money wasted in IKEA”. The artwork that fell on his head from the wall above our mattress on the floor as we fell exhausted into bed, was probably the final straw.

We are yet to work out how to get the internet or the tv to work and Kurt has already used up most of our data allowance, so it is already a “happy new home” with all the promise of our own distinctive brand of dysfunctionality – the type that you never read about in parenting magazines. Three nights with fuck-all to do has been costly to our livers, but I am trying to remember that we have a roof over our heads, hot water and we can hear the crash of waves from the ocean when the local teenage no-hopers – Kurt’s new friends, I assume – aren’t hooning down the road. So all is good with the world.

#Family #Home #perils #Humor #movinghouse