Well, nearly 2 weeks after moving in to Port 80, it is now (mostly) furnished. Recent acquisitions include a fancy new flat-screen TV and blue-ray DVD player, both installed in the mezzanine, a cordless telephone, a cute but very cheap wall clock, and the sofa-bed we ordered the week before from our new favourite shop, BUT. A quick word of thanks to our lovely car, Lola on the subject of the sofa-bed – we had planned a repeat of last week’s horrendous double round trip to Perigueux to collect it: drive there, pick up hire van, drive van home and unload it, take van back, collect car, drive home.
Périgueux is about 50 mins away, making this a most tedious activity. Anyway, we got there and found to our delight that the sofa bed fitted – just – into the car, so we managed it all sans van, in just the one trip. The sofa-bed is now assembled in the back bedroom that serves as my gym, music studio and now also as additional guest room. (See photos). So, our room is mainly done, guest bedroom #1 needs a bed (now ordered), guest bedroom #2 is more or less done, the ground floor lounge space is done (bar replacing the camping table and chairs with a proper set), the kitchen will be sorted once we get a cupboard or two for storage, and the mezzanine is done, barring shelving for books and DVDs. Not bad for 13 days’ work!
The kitties were equally grateful to Lola for speeding up our last excursion to Périgueux. So much chaos and so many days of parental absences were definitely not helping them settle into their new home. We took a few days to just chill at home and enjoy the house over the weekend, and this made a visible difference to their respective (and oh-so-different) mental states. They are still not quite right: the Smoo is unbelievably clingy and won’t let me out of his sight, curling up in my lap whenever possible – and Louis, polar opposite that he is, is still largely shunning us and the rest of the house in favour of the solitude and darkness of his “safe-box” full of pillows and duvets (which by now smells quite strongly of kitty). Now most of the upheaval is over though, we can all start re-establishing routines. I am back in the saddle as far as my workouts go, and Matt has made it to the pool for the first time in a number of weeks, so normality is being restored. I have even given the guitars their first airing. We hope that a few more safe, predictable and quiet days will be enough to get the boys fully settled. And then, we introduce them to the great outdoors and the horses!
The TV we ordered arrived a couple days ago and we are most pleased with it. We saw several in the Jan. sales, many of which were marked down by as much as 40%, which sounded like a great deal. Until, that is, you realise that the only reason they are marked down so much is that the RRP was OUTRAGEOUSLY inflated to begin with. Despite the “huge” discounts available in the French sales, it seems 99% of the time you are better off finding it online, where the prices are still significantly less than the sales prices. In particular, electronic goods are much more costly out here. It is very often cheaper to buy things from the UK and have them sent here, even factoring in the shipping costs. Sad but true. We were looking at TVs in the €6-700 range in stores, but ours, a better model even, cost us a little over €500 – and thanks to a deal Sony are doing at the moment, we get €100 back, so it ends up being a massive bargain. We have it all set up, so now have the dubious pleasure of access to French TV to entertain us in addition to our formidable DVD collection.
We are increasingly convinced that some stores simply stick “40% off” stickers on products during the sales but don’t actually charge any less: they simply amend the RRPs. We came across an example of this in our bed hunt – we saw a bed in the January sales, marked 20% off, that was nonetheless more expensive than it had been back in December. Another example of sales pricing weirdness is that when we were back in BUT to collect our sofa bed, we saw the exact same bed we had bought just a week before and the price had suddenly increased by around 20%, even though the sales are still on. We even saw a TV “on sale” in a supermarket where the sale price was €10 more than the RRP. The mind boggles…
We had a nice delivery from the post-man today. Matt had a lot of kitchen stuff in storage at his mum’s in Minneapolis, dating back from when he last owned a place, in San Francisco back in the late 90s. Jan kindly arranged to have it all shipped over to us here and the first box made it today – big thanks to Jan for that. Tonight, one of our French friends from Badaillac, Rebecca, is coming over for dinner with her son Tim, so it gives us a chance to put the plates to use for the first time in many years. Tomorrow, we are taking our local friends Nat and Jill out to lunch as a thank-you for their help and advice they offered during the house purchase. As it is now much closer, we shall be going to the restaurant in St Jean de Cole and not cute-waiter restaurant in Brantome. Less eye-candy, but better food.
Sharon is coming to ours on Saturday for dinner and that is the only other plan we have – the rest of the weekend will be a chill out. Literally, actually, given that it has just turned cold here after several unseasonally warm weeks. Hopefully it was serve to prepare me as I am coming back to Blighty on Monday to see everyone, and to do an inventory of furniture stored at my nan’s. London Calling!