Journal Ethelred Unraed's Journal: There is a higher power at large in this Universe... 16
Alas, it was not to be. There is a higher power at large in this Universe, and its name is Murphy.
It began a couple of days before the move. I had given five weeks' notice to our telephone and DSL provider that we're moving. Turns out, though, that they don't own the lines, but rather Deutsche Telekom does -- since Telekom (which is the formerly state-owned monopoly) still has a virtual monopoly on local-loop lines, and thus they don't give a flying rat's ass when or if you have phone service. So our provider was at the mercy of Deutsche Telekom, who decided to delay the changeover by two weeks...and I find this out the day before the move. Two weeks where I can't work at all or earn money.
But wait, it gets better.
The day of the move, we're expecting the moving company to show up at 7:30 in the morning. The plan was that they would need about two to three hours to do their thing, then I would pick up the rental van at 10 am, and all our minions^Wvolunteers would do the rest. The day after that, we'd renovate the old place with a second batch of volunteers, and clear out our old basement. All in two days.
8 o'clock, no sign of the movers. 9 o'clock, nothing. I call them and find out that they aren't going to come until 1 o'clock at the earliest. Which throws a wrench into our lunch plans, as we thought we'd have a working kitchen by noon with which to make lunch.
Meanwhile, all but two of our volunteers call in, and one by one they cancel for various reasons. Where I thought we'd have ten people, we only have FIL, MIL, my parents (my dad being unable to do anything as he can't walk too well) and our parish priest. And even the priest has to leave early, as he had to be back in the parish for a special event that evening.
So I go off with my FIL to get the van. We make it to the rental station, I go inside, and the helpful attendant asks me for my Visa card, my auto club card, my driver's license and my passport. I dutifully dig out my Visa card, my auto club card, my driver's license...and realize I left my passport in my other jacket. Without valid photo ID (for some reason my German driver's license didn't count), I can't rent the van. No problem, I think. FIL surely has his ID and cards with him. But no, it turns out MIL doesn't trust him with his own wallet (I wish I was making this up) and had taken it away from him before we left. (Nevermind that driving without a license is against the law...)
So the half-hour drive through ugly traffic was for naught. By now it's 11 am. We head back to the new apartment, where our intrepid band of volunteers is trying to move what little stuff in that they can without a van, using my in-law's little Opel. Some discussion arises about what to do for lunch. We decide to head over to the old place, since the kitchen is still intact there, and heat up the food we'd gotten. Just as we're about to go there, the moving company shows up an hour earlier than they said they would, and they commence to disassemble the kitchen and haul it off.
So we had to wait for the kitchen to be re-assembled in the new place. (Meanwhile, I'm starving, as I hadn't had an opportunity to have breakfast yet -- since my cellphone was constantly ringing for one thing or the other.) The deal was, we already had our own kitchen and appliances, but the new place had a somewhat nicer set of kitchen cabinets, though the appliances were rather old and beaten up. So we wanted to put our kitchen cabinets into storage, but have the (still fairly new) appliances put into the new apartment's kitchen.
Wrong answer.
First thing is that it turns out the space for the refrigerator is too narrow for our fridge. So we have to remove part of a cabinet to make space. Even then it's only barely large enough, such that the drawers next to it stick unless the fridge door is open. And the movers have to lift the fridge into the space, as the windowsill is in the way otherwise.
Then the one mover is trying to install our electric stove and oven, which require a high voltage (400 V) socket. (The old oven and stove were also electric, so I assumed that this wouldn't be a problem.) The technician gets down into the alcove for the oven, starts to screw open the high voltage socket...and it literally falls into his hand. Someone had literally torn out the wiring.
So I call the property mismanagement company. They insist that there was not and never was an electric stove or oven in this apartment. I point out that I had seen it with my own eyes, and that the previous tenant (whose predecessor was apparently the one who'd installed the kitchen in the first place) assured me that yes, there was an electric stove and yes, it worked fine. They still insisted that it was impossible that there had been an electric stove, since the power meter and voltage were not sufficient for any such thing. But the previous tenants had an electric stove...
So they send over an electrician (no mean feat, as it's by now Friday afternoon and most tradesmen in Germany are usually already off for the weekend), who takes one look at the wiring and point-blank says we're lucky the building is still standing. Turns out that the person who put in the kitchen had taken a simple wall socket and run lines out from it for the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the fridge and the microwave from one socket. Circuit breaker too weak? No problem, slap one with more amps on it.
That line must have been fscking glowing. Sure enough, later one of our volunteers discovered scorch marks all along the wall behind the kitchen cabinets.
So after some arguing with the mismanagement company, I demand a high voltage line and AC meter now, pointing out that the contract says I get an apartment in the state I saw it in before the move -- including an electrical stove. They cave in, not least because the property market in Hannover is completely in the toilet and paying renters are not to be taken for granted.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to get away to go get the damned van, as it's now 2 pm and I still haven't had lunch (most everyone else was munching on cold hot dogs and pasta salad while I was dealing with the movers and mismanagement company). Then it turns out that the tenant who originally put in the kitchen had screwed in the water faucet so tightly into the counter that the countertop was busted open, water had gotten in, and the wood was rotted. Which means 1) we can't install our faucet, and 2) we have to get a new countertop.
Part of the deal with the kitchen was that we took it over from our predecessors, and in exchange we said they didn't have to completely renovate the apartment (in Germany you normally have to leave the place as you found it, paint all the rooms, possibly even wallpaper them if you've lived there long enough, remove any flooring or fixtures you've added, etc.). Thing is, our predecessors took off without fixing the place up even as much as they were supposed to, so we had a couple of people painting the (newly carpeted) workroom...and they didn't properly cover the floor, so paint got everywhere.
And my MIL was in the children's bedroom, noticed a spot where the wallpaper was crumbling, pulled it back...and found that the wall underneath was moldy. Yet more calling back and forth on my cellphone with the mismanagement company, they send a painter, who tears out the wallpaper and plaster on that wall, sprays it with mold and fungus killer, and re-does the wall. (This by now legendary previous tenant, who shall be accursed, had put Styrofoam on the walls to soundproof them. Too bad the masonry couldn't breathe anymore, thus the mold.)
It's now 3 pm, and I badly need to get the van to at least get the heavier and more important items out of the old apartment (such as our bed and my old desk) while we still have our priest with us, as he's the only other able-bodied person present capable of lifting anything heavy (aside from myself -- and while I'm stronger than I look, that's not saying much). And he has to leave by 4. So I dash off with FIL again, this time with my passport, we get the van, and come back at 3:59. The priest does at least stay long enough to get the desk down and into the van, but MIL and I have to wrestle it back up later on.
By this point the movers have thrown up their hands in despair at getting the kitchen installed, though they did at least get all our big stuff into the apartment.
Meanwhile, MIL, as is her wont, starts acting like she's the Person In Charge and starts "packing" the rest of our stuff. Mind you, MIL has literally never moved in her life. She still lives on the same property where she was born. So you'll excuse me if I bridle a bit at her claiming to know all about moving and packing, especially when her method of "packing" was to produce a bunch of flimsy laundry baskets, literally toss things at random into them (and I say "toss" for good reason), and haul them downstairs. I try to protest and get her to pack things properly, but she insists she knows what she's doing, and I'm too distracted and busy to argue.
So at one point she has FIL and myself carry down a particularly laden basket downstairs; I intend to re-pack it in the van, but on the way down it falls over, and the contents come crashing out. What were the contents? Oh, just all of our glasses, which weren't wrapped, weren't marked (but just stuffed into small boxes), and she didn't tell us that it was glass. She comes racing downstairs and lights into us for not being careful.
Meanwhile, my mom has discovered that we have no hot water in the new kitchen -- but, strangely, we do have it in the bathroom. More calls to the mismanagement company, which grumbles and sends over a plumber. He shows up, finds that the water hose for the hot water has a kink in it. BoE asks him to replace the hose. He says no, that wasn't what the mismanagement company told him to do (!), so he just straightened it a bit and takes off. (This hose costs exactly €3.49 at the local hardware store. I'd install it myself, but I'd catch hell if anything went wrong, which given the way the move has gone, it will go wrong. But apparently the mismanagement company can't cough up the €3.49 to replace the fscking hose.)
So I come back to the new place to try and coordinate things, and discover that my in-laws had completely been ignoring the labels on the boxes and had been putting them pretty much randomly around the apartment with no rhyme or reason.
At the same time, I notice that every door in the apartment is open. Including the front door. And including the door to the children's room, where we had locked up Cleo-Kitty to keep her safe. In spite of the big sign with red letters saying "KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED" in English and German. I wig out and try to find Cleo, searching high and low for her...and it turns out she's cowering in the buffet, but not after BoE and I damned near had a heart attack. MIL meanwhile claims Cleo-Kitty would never, ever run off. Guess who left the door open.
Oh, and I still hadn't eaten anything but one bread roll by this point. It's now 7 pm, and my in-laws (who are the only halfway physically capable people left aside from myself) have to go home. We manage to get our bed set up, and we go to get food at the Turkish joint nearby. We finally get some last things over with the van, and have to take it back by 8 pm.
So off to bed with us.
And both the Confessor and Cleo-Kitty spend their first night in the new place crying all night. So no sleep for us. (And it was like this the next week or so. We averaged about two to three hours of sleep over the last couple of weeks...)
Next morning, we end up begging the rental place for a van (the rate on Saturdays is double the regular rate) and continue moving stuff over. Once again, most of our volunteers cancel on us, but some old friends of BoE's do in fact show up. A Godsend, because the husband used to work for a construction company years ago and was very handy about the house, so he was able to get a lot of things working where the movers left off. But even he was unable to handle everything, and we were overwhelmed with the amount of work left to do -- getting rooms fixed up so we could move in, getting the old place organized to move the last bits out (since my MIL succeeded in throwing everything into utter chaos over there with her basket-packing techniques), moving stuff up the stairs and whatnot.
FIL has started sanding the kitchen cabinets, which BoE wants to paint red (they were painted an ugly dull mint green). I give him plastic drop cloths and so on to protect the new floor that we'd recently installed and leave him to his devices.
Later I come back into the kitchen, and he's not put down the drop cloths, but just started sanding away. So all the fine green paint dust is now all over the floor, which he tracked into the floor as well. A couple days later I spent some hours scrubbing it to get the paint out again, some of which will never come out.
A bit later, BoE lights into him over that, and tells him to put down drop cloths before putting on the first coat of paint...which of course he doesn't, so the primer paint drips on the new floor as well (some of which is still there, as I can't get it off).
BoE again tells him to use a drop cloth when putting on the red paint. I'll give you one guess as to whether he did or not.
The ladders that my in-laws and our friends brought to install lights also all turn out to be too short, as our ceilings are about four meters high. So no lights.
And so on. And this all goes up to noon of the second day of the move, to give you an idea of what the whole move has been like...and we only did the almost-last bits yesterday, almost two weeks after we intended to be done. And even then, this description leaves out a lot from those first two days, or the fact I had to haul our computers back and forth to BoE's old employer (as they urgently needed data from them, and a client of mine urgently needed stuff, so I used their Net connection) clear across Hannover's metro area. Or that my dad repeatedly had problems with extremely low blood sugar, so bad that we nearly had to call an ambulance. And all manner of other mishaps and misdemeanors.
And I only get Net and phone access yesterday. My cellphone bill is going to be insane. And basically no income for two weeks.
Yay me.
And we're still not done yet. *sigh*
But apart from all that... (Score:2)
...things are going great?
Oh. My. God. (Score:2)
I can only hope that it all gets better. Soon. As in right now.
For pure visceral satisfaction perhaps you could have FIL clean up his mess in the kitchen. I mean, if it wasn't going to be that big of a deal to make the mess then it surely can't be that big of a
Re:Oh. My. God. (Score:2)
Heh -- on the first day I even joked with the priest that it was good we had a priest present, 'cause I was going to need one.
Basically by the end of the day I was just numb. I still am. I've lost the will to care anymore (if it weren't for my sense of humor, I'
Oh man (Score:2)
You know? (Score:1)
Slacker.
Re:You know? (Score:2)
Short answer: you.
Stop. STTTTTOOOOOOOPPPPP!!!! (Score:2)
I hope it's over for you soon and you guys get some rest and some work.
Re:Stop. STTTTTOOOOOOOPPPPP!!!! (Score:2)
Like I said to Talinom above, I was (am) basically just so numb that I was beyond caring anymore. It's like being in a movie, a tragicomedy of sorts. Haven't seen the happy ending yet, either.
Ah. The washing machine's water line is dripping again. Must call the plumber. *sigh*
Do you deliver pizza to Hannover?
Cheers,
Ethelred
Gosh. (Score:2)
That reminds me ... (Score:2)
A Two Mothers-in-Law.
Sell the story (Score:1)
Glad you're back. I already got a bit worried about your absence...
Am I reading this right (Score:2)
What sort of wiring do they use in
Re:Am I reading this right (Score:2)
It depends on the apartment. Some include a kitchen, some don't. Often what happens is that a tenant installs a kitchen and sells it to his/her successor at some agreed price, though officially it's supposed to be out of the apartment when the tenant moves out. (More about this below.)
This is what we did, since our old kitc
stubborn is the new friendly (Score:1)
it's funny (Score:2)
I feel your pain. Nothing sucks like moving and it looks like you hit the superfecta of moving suckiness. Be strong. This too shall pass.
ouch (Score:1)
I had never heard about the thing about not owning your own kitchen in Germany, but I did know the statistics about not owning property and not moving often. That would make sense where MIL and FIL would be almost useless in terms of moving, especially a short distance.
Sounds like the new place is worth it tho. Hope you get settled in soon and it won't effect you too badly financially.
^_^