Too late for Tuscany?

Living In A Box

At 5.45pm Sunday, Mrs J and I sat down to watch il Palio (live from Siena), courtesy of Rai Uno, but by 8 o'clock, with 3 false starts and fading light even the producer had had enough and switched transmission to Rai Tre, and almost immediately they were off!  After all that waiting, in only 3 minutes its all over, whilst I couldn't swear to it, I think the winner was 'the Owl' (Civetta), with my favourite, 'the Giraffe' ending his ambitions in the dirt of corner one.  It's pretty hard to think of something that can surpass the Italian passion for football, but at least twice a year il Palio comes pretty close.

Where was I? ah yes, saviouring the delights of IKEAs designers in MDF.  After such a fun-packed day out in Rimini we couldn't face doing anything, so we filled the Soggiorno and Cucina with boxes and retired to the terrace for a snifter.  Next morning bright and early we surveyed our prized purchases, and decided that sofa's were a priority, but before that some on-the-job training was in order.  I previously neglected to mention that travelling with us was Mrs J's brother, who funnily enough is studying in the land of IKEA, but had never had the pleasure of erecting any of their flat-packs, so a quick apprenticeship on a Bekvam was initiated.  Now to most consumers IKEA's product names seem to border on the ridiculous, but BiL informed me (and he should know he's learning Swedish), that all the names actually mean something (in Sweden), not a lot of people know that.

With 8 out of 10 points for his Bekvam BiL was now qualified to help assemble the sofa's.  Is it me, but for once I thought I could buy something from IKEA, unwrap it and sit on it, no chance, it probably took the two of us best part of an hour, and the intervention of an electric drill (that wasn't mentioned in the instructions), to get the first sofa ship-shape.  The 2nd one, not needing the drill treatment, came along a bit quicker.  After a swift lunch break (some pizza's from Pieve), and a bit more floor cleaning (a constant throughout our week), it was time to tackle the main event, the kitchen units.

I won't bore you with the tedious details, but suffice to say the whole process was: Back-breaking [all that bending to assemble cabinets], repetitive [counting and fixing endless different kinds of screws] and boring [ditto the screws thing].  Whilst the end-result may be a budget option, a thought does cross your mind, how much is my time worth? and the end result? the jury is still out, as we couldn't finish it in the time alloted as we didn't have the Dishwasher [another one of those things ejected off the van], so I didn't want to finally fix all the boxes, drill holes for the sink etc, this also meant that we couldn't get the plumber back that week, as planned, to connect the gas to the cooker, good job we all like pizza. Buon Ferragosto

8 Days A Week

Is it me, or is it just too-hot-to-blog? I mean, would JK Rowling have written so much if she wasn't in Scotland?, if you just compare her latest tome (at 600+ pages), to your average Hemingway, penned in a less than cool-Cuba (barely breaking 110 pages), then it seems to be that cold climates produce more prolific writers, so it is then that a lull in our routine 36 degree days allows me to set down a few of our exploits on our recent Chicken House moving-in trip.

Where to start? with the van full of goodies, and the windswept road trip to Bella Italia?, no doubt you're getting bored with those tales, but suffice to say that I was
expecting our MB Vito van to be more Tardis-like, which resulted in half of our cargo (of course the heaviest half), to have to be returned from whence it came on the 9th floor, severely testing both my patience and my muscles.  Amazing that so much humping, resulting from literally weeks of judicious box packing, resulted in barely covering half of the living room (Soggiorno), upon our touch-down at CH!

One omission that was left behind in the heat of the moment, and regretted for the whole trip was the mattress to our bed (the bed did make it), it seemed like a small sacrifice after 3 or 4 hours toing and froing, but our only alternative in Italy was to use a handy blow-up bed I had bought for guests, which after a long days toil in the house didn't really give either me or Mrs J, 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep (8 minutes perhaps, until one or the other of us rolled over, with the resulting noise waking not just us but half of the neighbourhood also).

Now, call me stupid, or maybe just naive even after all this time, but I had expected to walk into our newly refurbished house, and expect it to be clean.  I mean, the major building work had finished months ago, the second fix of electrics and plumbing was in, and the painter had done his stuff.  Exactly, but he seems to have been caught short at the end of it, or perhaps there was an air-raid warning, as he had obviously left the place in a real rush, the rooms in a mess, and all the paint tins too.  This then set the pace for the whole week, laboriously sweeping, washing every room repeatedly, and more galling, cleaning up the million (I exaggerate not), paint drops on our precious cotto floor, I mean it would have been cheaper to have had our floor covered in gold-leaf, and this guy throws paint all over it, uff, don't get me started.  

If our first day as Italians was all about cleaning, then the second should have been altogether more exciting, as we went to Rimini.  No, not to the beach, but to IKEA's latest opening (did you know that IKEA have 14 stores in Italy?), and I'd like to go on record that the whole experience was probably the best I've ever had in one of Mr Kamprad's shops, whether it was the really helpful, and English speaking staff, or the emptiness of the store (probably attributable to the fact it was Tuesday, and the store had only been open a few weeks), or the fantastic food in the restaurant (no, I don't mean meat-balls covered in goo, but fantastic Cannelloni), and IKEA in Italy has a bar, where you can stand up and get your expresso, how civilised is that?  Regardless of all this efficiency, my idea of a quick trip to get our sofa's and kitchen, still resulted in a full 8 hours there and back, which of course is nothing compared to the 3 or 4 days required to assemble all of the boxes you have just spent your hard earned cash on, but more of that excitement later.  Ciao