I’d drawn a mental line under the spending. When the last workman put his key through the letterbox and drove off down the road I somehow imagined it was all done.
But no. Freezer. Microwave. Dining room furniture. Bedding. A TV and license. A phone line. Broadband… I’ve got a list that scrolls right down my screen and I’m ticking them off one point at a time.
Fortunately, apart from the supplies for the outhouse and kitchen cupboards, most of it is stuff you buy once and then use for years and years, so it averages out over time. The worrying thing, though, is that by buying them all at once (and of course the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine and tumble dryer are only a few months old) they’ll probably all go wrong at about the same time, so it could be a cyclical thing where you get hit by a big fix-up bill every five years.
Still, it’ll be nice when it’s all in there are ready to go, and it feels good to be finally getting the place kitted out as these jobs seem to have been hanging for weeks, and I wasn’t convinced that they’d all be done in time for Christmas – the dining room furniture in particular.
Fortunately that one was solved by a trip to the old ice rink in Norwich, which is now home to Country and Eastern, a snazzy-pants furniture shop selling 300 year old Chinese trunks, Indian temple doors, Russian samovars and Japanese cushions. All very interesting, and interspersed between much more conventional items that you could fit into a regular three-bed semi.
It got delivered in record time, which was impressive, but not quite as impressive as the speed at which you can get a phone line these days. I called up BT and sat on hold for 31 minutes, but within 10 minutes of getting to speak to someone they’d remotely tested my line, assigned me a number (a nice easy one, too), done a credit check, signed me up for broadband (with the world’s easiest ever password, the fools) and ordered the digital TV service that won’t work in my area and the VoIP phone that will.
I remember times gone by when you had to have a man in overalls in your house just to get a dial tone sharpened up.
Marvellous stuff.
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