An exhilarating week and an exhausting one. Exhilarating
because the furniture arrived on Tuesday, finally, and exhausting because from
then on it was one endless round of extreme aerobics. Bending down to lift
heavy boxes; carrying them to another place; cutting them open and bending
again to get down to the bottom of the box and then plenty of stretching to put
things in their (hopefully) appointed places. My poor muscles don’t know what’s
hit them and my back feels as if it’s about to give in. And it would be
wonderful to be able to say that we have made great progress but although we
have mountains of emptied and flattened boxes outside the door, and another,
bigger mountain of boxes full of newsprint packing paper or bubble wrap, the
house still seems to be filled to the brim with cardboard in one form or
another.
However, let me start at the beginning. We had been told
that the truck with its 40 foot container, which sounds so much bigger than a
twelve point something-or-other metre, would be arriving in the village at 8.30
am. Horrors! That meant we would have to leave our ‘gite’ at about 7 am, in
case they were a bit early. And that would mean getting up before the sparrows
– a really difficult thing for us. We made it though, but only just. We were
about five minutes away when we got a phone call asking where we were because
they had arrived, and which side of the church was the house. We rushed along
the last bit of twisty road and found that the container had in fact, not yet
arrived but was sitting parked up at an intersection not far away. The three
young unpackers had arrived beforehand in a smaller van and , ever wary of
directing the huge vehicle into an impossible space, had first come to find the
house before calling the container on. Even so, getting the container
positioned correctly was quite a delicate job and only entailed blocking two of
the access roads to the village for a short time!
Our new friend, Christian, heard the commotion and the
shouting as the container was manoeuvred into place and strolled over to see if
he could help in any way. What a bonus he turned out to be! Positioning himself
near the back of the container and at the bottom of the front steps, he
appointed himself ‘checker’ As each item emerged from the container, its number
was called out and Christian crossed it off the list. Neels was standing nearby
and he could read the label on each item and direct it to the ‘cave’
(cellar),’premier etage’ (first floor) or ‘en haute’ (upstairs). This stage of
the delivery went really fast mostly because the container could only stay for
three hours and then had to start back for Bordeaux. So our 264 items came
literally flying out to be grabbed by one of the young men and dumped in the
right (sort of) place in the house.
After days of miserable gloomy weather with intermittent
rain and icy winds, Tuesday was a brilliant, sunny, windless day. We have
learnt though, never to take the weather for granted and everyone was hustling
to get all the items under cover in case the rain came again. Fortunately, it
didn’t as a few things stood around outside for quite some time as we
desperately tried to stretch the house walls to accommodate them.
Eventually it was all in and we could barely see one another
for all the boxes. In places they were stacked three high which is equivalent to
almost two meters. Then started the unpacking. We had decided beforehand that
we only wanted the pieces of furniture unwrapped and the packaging taken away,
although there was a minor lack of communication and some boxes got unpacked
before we realised what was happening. By this time it was getting fairly late
anyway, so we told the guys that they could go and that they need not return
the following day. They were over the moon at that, but they had really worked
hard for it. I wish I had had a video camera to film them getting the really
big heavy stuff upstairs, but I didn’t even think about taking a photograph!
The stairs are not wide, they have a right-angled bend at the bottom and are
quite steep and we had to somehow get a queen-sized bed and mattress, a
standard double bed and mattress and my enormous antique computer desk all
upstairs. If it hadn’t been so ‘heart-in-the-mouth’, it would have been really
funny. There was plenty of yelling and shouting; many ‘attende’s’ (wait) and
much huffing and puffing. At one stage I looked up to see the shortest guy
hanging on to my desk with one hand as the other two tried to let go below and
transfer to higher up the stairs. It was only when he let out a sort of shriek
that they quickly returned to where they had been and worked out another
strategy. Finally everything was more or less where we wanted it and they went
off.
The next day we started unpacking boxes in earnest. I know
one should not joke about another person’s lack of language skills, but some of
the labelling on the boxes gave us a few much needed smiles. Like the three
boxes of ‘Office staff’ and one of ‘Cleaning staff’ that were among our goods.
They should, of course, have been ‘office stuff’ and ‘cleaning stuff’. And
another mystery box that we thought contained baskets. When opened we found all
our many and varied buckets. The label said ‘Bakets’!
Our biggest problem is lack of storage space. There are no
built-in cupboards in the bedrooms and building any is going to be decidedly
tricky as the bedrooms are in the roof space and only have about 60 cms of
vertical wall before the roof starts sloping up to the peak. We need our
clothes badly as we are heartily sick and tired of the ones we brought with us,
but I am nervous about opening a box and finding all our ‘hanging’ clothes and
nowhere to hang them. It is the same in the pantry/kitchen. I was relying on
the pantry space as a great storage area for all sorts of kitchen equipment,
but the shelves have yet to be erected, but they can’t be because the pantry is
full of boxes and there is very little place for them to go without enormous
effort and as I said at the start, I am pretty nearly fresh out of effort.
However, on the plus side and with Pieter’s help, we have
carpeting in the bedrooms and landing, we have a dividing wall between the
workshop and the laundry and we have an enormous pile of firewood that had to
be fetched and stacked, which we probably would have battled to do. We also
would not have managed to unload the container so quickly if it hadn’t been for
Christian managing the checklist as he could understand the numbers being
called out to him in French. Finally, but not last, we have to thank our hosts
Pat and Finlay for the use of their ‘gite’ without really knowing how long they
were destined to be our hosts and to Finlay especially for the generosity he
showed in allowing us to use all and any of the tools and equipment in his very
well-stocked workshop. It was purely due to this generosity that we were even
nearly ready to accept the furniture when it arrived.
Friday was a big day as we spent our first night in the
house and how marvellous it was to sleep in our own bed again. Not that we
haven’t been very comfortable where we are, but there is just something about
one’s own bed.
Pieter has , sadly, to leave us on Sunday as he has things
to attend to at home, but he will hopefully be back very soon. I hope that by
then we will have the house all in order.
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