We're Back

After a week without internet, we are finally all connected again.  We moved into our new house on Wednesday 28^th and this will now be our permanent accommodation for the rest of our stay in Sweden.  (if you want the address, send Kris or I a message on facebook or email).

Originally we were due to check out of our temporary accommodation on Friday at 10am and move into the new house on the same day.  This was a bit of a worry as even without our airfreight (which still hasn’t arrived) we had more than a single full car load of stuff.  The plan was to meet the landlord and do a handover, which included a full condition inspection of the house – which was slated to take about an hour to an hour and a half.  So, the original plan was to somehow have this meeting (which had to be later than 8:30am) then get all the gear out of our apartment, down 5 flights of stairs, into the car and then to the new house (which is a 15 minute drive away) and also get the apartment cleaned up and the keys returned by 10am.  There was no way that was going to happen, so I pushed to try to get access to the house earlier or to have the apartment for longer.

The landlord came through and gave us access on Wednesday instead of Friday, so that took a big load off our minds.  Kristine being Kristine, she had us all pretty much packed by the time I got home from work on Tuesday and had already scrubbed the walls and mopped the floor.

The apartment we were moving into was completely unfurnished, except for whitegoods and a few desks and chairs that the landlord left for us. Work gave us an allowance of 100,000sek (about AUD $16,000) to set it up, so we had some shopping to do.  Of course, being in Sweden, the best place to outfit an entire house was Ikea.  In Australia we had visited the Ikea store and website and picked a pretty complete list of what we needed and the week before the move we took a trip to Ikea and confirmed that the items were available and what we wanted.  They wouldn’t let us pre-order anything from the store (you can pre-order online, but for store delivery they will only delivery same or next day) so we placed an order Tuesday after work and asked them to delivery Wednesday afternoon, when we would be settled into the new house.

Wednesday morning we took the kids to school and then went to collect the car.  We were going to load up some of the bags, but by the time we got back from the school and picked up the car we didn’t really have much time left.  We drove to the house and started on the inspection and discussions at 9:30am.  At 10am, as we were just starting to inspect the first room, two Ikea trucks arrived with our furniture.  It was rather embarrassing as we hadn’t signed the contract at that point but there we were with two full trucks of furniture and two deliverymen waiting in the rain.  So while I continued the condition inspection, Kristine and the landlord let the Ikea guys in and they loaded all of the furniture into the lounge room.  To get to the front door, they needed to walk over a small path of rocks, which they then spread across the wooden floors.  In Sweden it is customary to remove your shoes when you enter a house (as they are often wet and muddy), but these guys had to do about 20 trips in and out to get all the boxes and so left theirs on.  I don’t think we made a good first impression as the landlord watched them spreading rocks through the house, but we fixed that by having Kristine pull out the broom and vacuum cleaner and pick the stones up before they could scratch the floor.

Our Ikea boxes - stacked neatly

 

Eventually  by 10:30 we had all the stuff delivered and at 11 we were all signed up.  We then drove back to the apartment and while Kristine looped the block looking for a carpark (she eventually settled for parking on the road outside the apartment like everyone else) I ran upstairs and started loading the bags into the small cargo lift.  The lift was only just big enough for me and two or three of the bags, and pretty slow, so it took us quite a while to get the first car load in.  We then drove this back to the house, ran inside and dumped it in amongst the boxes, before returning for the next load.  

After stopping for a quick lunch, we began sorting the next load out, when I realized that it was 1:45 and the kids finished school at 2.  I left Kristine to finish packing the last bags, while I jumped on public transport and ran to the kids school.  I got there about 10 minutes late and the kids were waiting for me in the admin office (not bad, 2^nd day of school and I was already late – not the best look) but everyone was ok and we jumped back on the bus.  They were already starting to put up Christmas decorations, including a huge teddy bear made from lights.

The Trianglen Teddy Bear

We got back to Malmö just as Kris was finishing loading the last of the gear and mopping the floors.  I did a quick run through to make sure we had everything and then the kids said goodbye to the apartment for the last time and we drove to our new house.

 

By now the lounge looked like a bomb had exploded.  There were Ikea boxes everywhere, as well as our hastily dumped luggage and bags of toys, clothes and misc from the apartment.

There was no way we were going to be able to get all of the furniture together in time and we realized that we still needed some things to settle in – doona covers, pillow cases and some extra lamps as well as TVs.  The landlord had left us with some cutlery and crockery but it was an odd assortment so we needed to go and buy some sets so we had something to eat off.  We also had no blinds or curtains.  While we figured we would wait and get some decent curtains (rather than rush and end up with ones that didn’t fit), we did need something to cover the windows of the kids bedrooms.

Hence we went back to Ikea.  To start with, we stopped at an electronic store called MediaMart that was just across the road from Ikea.  There we got two TVs and some screens for my computer (which is coming over in airfreight).  We figured we’d put them in the back of the car and then go to Ikea.  The trouble was the 48” TV was too big for that.  No matter how we tried, we could not get it in the boot.  In the end we put it across the back seats of the car by getting the kids to tuck their feet up.  Obviously we weren’t going to get to Ikea like that, so we ducked home and dropped off the electronics and drove back to Ikea.  It was already dark and felt like 10pm, so I checked my phone – it was 4pm.

So far we had spent about 70k of the 100k sek we were allocated.  The first load of furniture was about 66k sek (aboutAUD$11,000), the TVs, monitors and a couple of assorted electronics things (mixer, kitchen scales and iron) came to 17k (AUD$2700 – pretty decent price really) and we’d also spent 1700sek on sheet sets earlier.

We tossed up having dinner first (Ikea köttbullar – meatballs) but it was too early so we decided to wait (a bad decision – see the next blog post).

This Ikea trip yielded another 7000sek – cutlery, crockery, glasses, pots and pans, rubbish bins – it’s amazing what you need to buy when you have nothing.  We got some blankets to cover the windows for now and since Sweden requires some pretty serious sorting of rubbish we ended up with 5 rubbish bins – paper/cardboard, glass, plastics, metal/cans and general rubbish (we also have brown paper bags for food scraps). Again we tossed up getting dinner at Ikea as it was now about 6pm, but we had so much stuff we just needed to get it home.  It took a while to load the car, and all of our Tetris skills to get it all to fit – I swear if we’d had a car accident on the way home we would have been sliced, diced, mashed, whisked and handily packaged into trash bins ready for disposal.

Once all the stuff was loaded into the house I started getting the beds set up – well when I say beds, I mean mattresses on the floor.  The kids have loft-beds which include a desk, cupboard, shelves and a bunk bed, so there was no way that was being assembled quickly.  I suggested that Kris duck out to get some take-away for dinner while I got the bed setup.  Kris was the victim here as I still hadn’t driven the car on the right-hand side of the road and since it was dark and wet and we were tired, it wasn’t the best time for me to go for a solo drive.  I set up Kris’ phone to googlemaps and loaded the directions to the nearest Burger King – only about 10min away and she set off, while I set up the mattresses, doonas etc.

I’ll detail her full adventures in the next blog post, but eventually we all got to sleep about 9:30pm on mattresses on the floor surrounded by our box fort of Ikea furniture.