Home Sweet Home

Its such a new n refreshing (and fatiguing) experience to set up a new home all for yourself (and your husband of course!) Having never really bought furniture for a house, it was a brand new adventure... Me, S and a couple of friends went to a furniture super store, a certain brand name beginning with I. Having never been to the store before, we had no idea how it worked... For on the ground floor, we saw a vast expanse of warehousey space with stacks of furniture, all in boxes, arranged over expanses of shelves ready to be shipped we assumed. But we also saw a bunch of people refer something, pick the required boxes off the selves, load them on carts and head to checkout. Spare parts, we assumed. On enquiring, we found out that we didnt have to pick stuff off the racks this way. Instead we could go to the top floor and view the assembled furniture and pick what we desired. What a relief.. And so we went.. I went hyper seeing some of the stuff they had on display and S and I disagreed on almost every piece of furniture. So Day 1 turned out as a Disaster Day considering the store was closing early that too. We reached a consensus to go home, browse the website, make educated decisions and come back the next day to place the orders directly.

After a productive evening of finalizing all the furniture, we went back the next day... While waiting for S to arrive, me with my broken French and excellent charades managed to get most of the stuff listed for billing... The guy upstairs in his broken English told me that now we had to go downstairs and pay for everything and arrange for the shipping. Sounded fairly simple... To our horror though, later we discovered that the list that the upstairs guy was merely the reference paper we'd seen many poor souls refer and lunge huge stuff on carts. And sadly Day 2, it was just S and me. Panting and puffing we lunged all the damned furniture onto the carts with me actually putting my foot down (under the weight of was it the cupboard or the bed - bah who cares?) After the lengthy bill, the bank account depleted, we were still not done!! It so happened that the bed being huge wasn't kept out there with the rest of the stuff.. We had to wait an eon before they called our number and delivered the huge bed n mattress to us and another eon while we gave them back everything and paid them to have them deliver it home the next day.

Thought we were done? Not quite.. The delivery man appears a half hour after the hour stated and dumps all of the stuff from a truck right on the footpath in front of our house (I'd actually opened out the French windows in the hope of coaxing him to dump them into the house). Now me n a friend lunge back everything into the house and my foot gets caught once more, this time under the bed. Feet sore, all samaan in? Now we're done?? No baby, this is the beginning. For now, we had to fit everything together to make it look like the catalogue from mere cartons.

3 days hence..... a couple of more trips, a couple more stores... 90% done.. a bit more to go... the house is finally taking shape.. Yeaaaaay!!