Our Second Job

After the last few days, I think Kristine and I are about ready to apply for a new job – Ikea furniture construction. I don’t mind assembling the odd item at home, but when you have to do a whole house it gets a bit crazy.  Here’s what we had to assemble:

-        Egg Chair x1,
-        Chest of Drawers (6 drawers) x2,
-        Chest of Drawers (2 drawers) x3,
-        Loft Bed with Desk x3,
-        Drawers for Loft Bed x12,
-        Dining Table x1,
-        Dining Chair x6,
-        Bedside Cabinet x2,
-        Queen Bed x1,
-        Lamp x5,
-        Kids Chairs x 2,
-        TV display cabinet x1,
-        Sofa Bed x2,
-        Sofa x2,
-        Coffee Table x2,
-        Desk Chair x5, and
-        Storage Shelving x2

Originally I planned to have the Wednesday off work in order to receive the furniture, return to work Thursday and then have Friday off so I could assemble it all over the weekend.  After the events of Wednesday night (see previous post) I thought it would be better to have Thursday off and go to work on Friday.

Thursday morning we dropped the kids off at school and got started on Tomas’ loft bed.  We expected that we should be able to get at least the four beds put together before we had to pick up the kids at 2pm.  How wrong we were…

At 1:30 we had mostly completed Tomas bed, having skipped lunch in order to keep pushing through.  We had gotten home around 9am so we’d spent almost 5 hours on it. We had to leave it to pick up the kids and then we went to do a big shop in order to fill the fridge and pantry.  When we got home we finished Tom’s bed off.  Sorry Alana and Cameron, looks like you’ll be sleeping on the floor again…

We finished up the drawers for Tomas’ bed that night while watching a movie (from a friend’s hard-drive, we didn’t have TV or internet yet).  The next day I went back to work and Kris put together the kitchen table and chairs, only to find that one of the chairs had been delivered broken.  They had also forgotten to deliver the ironing board.  We were going to try to assemble the next bed after work on Friday but knowing that it would take 4 hours we decided that we’d rather finish up some of the sets of drawers so that the kids could go to bed on time.

We finished the other two beds over the weekend (it took about 3-4 hours per bed) and over the next couple of days we got the rest of the main floor furniture together, leaving just the basement – Kristine and my room.

Another trip to Ikea got the chair replaced, the ironing board collected and another 4000kr of gear like towels and washing baskets.

Over the next week we finished up getting the rest of the furniture assembled and then were left with the problem that we had completely filled the sunroom with empty boxes and plastic wrapping.  Kristine spent an entire day folding and compacting the boxes to a manageable amount, but then came the next problem – what do we do with all of it?

There didn’t seem to be any recycling bins for the house and we didn’t know what the Swedish word for dump or tip was.  Google translate suggested some options but we couldn’t find any of those words on the map.  I asked one of the guys from work who lived in the same area and he pointed us in the direction of a recycling centre – återvinningscentral in a place called Bunkeflostrand (don’t ask me how to pronounce that one – something like B-unn-kee-floos-strund).

Next was setting up TV and internet.  We didn’t see anything like an aerial port so we did some asking around – it seems that the best bet was to get the TV connected through the fibre internet cable to the house and then Wi-Fi it from the router to a set-top box.  We ended up getting the medium speed internet package 250Mb/s with no quota for about 299sek a month (about $50) and the basic cable TV package.  All up it was somewhere around $120 a month for cable TV to two TVs and internet.  We also had to buy the set top boxes and Wi-Fi repeaters that came to about 1700sek (just under $300).  They said it would take about a week to be connected.  Our router arrived in the mail two days later and I was able to get it all up and connected straight away.

So now we are finally settled in our new house with the furniture assembled and TV and internet working.  All that remains is to receive our air freight, which I’m told should arrive on Tuesday the 8^th.

Just a small number of boxes to get rid of

One of the three loads of boxes that Kristine dumped.