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
It seems that everything's going smoothly for your house renovation. It's been a while since you've last posted an update on your house. How did things go? Could you share some of the photos? I'm sure that your readers would want to see the progress.
Posted by: Steven Lodrhowe | May 25, 2011 at 04:40 PM