A lot can happen in a week

It's a over a week since our last post and so much seems to have happened, or perhaps I should say not happened.

As for Ikea, I can say that the 4th promised delivery date (yesterday) has come and gone so you can probably feel the bad vibes from that all the way back in NZ. To the contrary, Castorama said they would deliver our four wardrobes yesterday, only 4 days after ordering them, and voila, they arrived in the square below at 3pm. That was fantastic, we then only had to lug the 200+ kg of packages up our three flights of stairs!

On Tuesday afternoon we drove into Perpignan and collected our friends Sandra and Jeff. They had pretty much just flown out from NZ, with one night in Lyon, but were not too tired. It was great to catch up with them and also made John and I stop working on the place for the four days they were here. The timing was perfect as we were too knackered to have worked anyway. S & J weren't tempted to share our blow-up mattress with us so we'd already booked them into Hotel des Arcades just above Bar Pablo. Unfortunately, Tuesday and Wednesday saw bands playing outside Bar Pablo and they got very little sleep, With Jeff also suffering from a bad case of hay fever, which he brought with him, they did their best to soldier on. Anyway, we had a nice quiet day on Wednesday,  a day-trip over the Pyrenees for lunch just over the border in Spain on Thursday and a wonderful afternoon and lunch out at our coast on Friday. 

Lunch at Tapis, Spain

Le Poisson Rouge, Port-Vendres

Friday morning was a big one for us - signing day at the notaire's office with our new purchaser, Magdalena. We were supposed to sign on the Monday but our utterly useless notaire hadn't bothered to schedule our meeting. It was left to our real-estate agent, in her first hour back from a month's holiday, to get things organised. We met up with our purchaser during the week and she was just as exasperated. She'd flown from Sweden on the Saturday, expecting the meeting to be on Monday, then have the whole week to move in and start making the place her own. As it was, we signed on the Friday and she flew out early Saturday morning. She hopes to be back though before we leave at the end of October as we are all keen to share a glass of champagne and celebrate. 

Magdalena,very happy 

Last view of Place de l'Eglise - No Regrets!

However, as far as we were concerned, we eventually signed on the last day in August before capital gains tax potentially made a great hike on 1 September. Something we had been at pains to avoid since deciding to sell the place. It all ended out well and we had a very enjoyable celebratory late lunch beside the sea with Sandra and Jeff at Port Vendres, followed by a wander around and large ice-cream at Collioure.

I forgot to say that we had a mini-housing warming at our new place on Thursday night. Some of our friends were heading back home overseas and a few new ones had just arrived so we had apero and nibbles, which lasted until nearly 11pm. Thankfully some of them brought their own chairs but, though a game of musical chairs was suggested, a number ended up sitting on upturned paint cans and cushions for most of the evening!

House-warming No.1

After dropping Sandra and Jeff off at Perpignan airport mid-morning we spent the rest of the weekend catching up on overdue IT work for John and book editing for my publisher for me. However, you know us too well, and we couldn't stop ourselves on Sunday evening from pulling everything that was being stored in the spare bedroom out into the "dining room", spreading out a plastic sheet and re-erecting the scaffold in anticipation of starting painting the bedroom the next day.

Monday was full-on painting. No Ikea, no builder for the parquet laying and no beds (supposedly due sometime this week) but we did get all the sanding and undercoat done. The place is an absolute shambles because the mezzanine has to remain empty in readiness for the builder. Hence all of the living area and our bedroom is chocka with stuff, with little room to move around anywhere.

Not the easiest to find clothes

Tuesday. We finished painting the spare bedroom but had no energy to clean up the room. I am delighted I have no more 'cutting in' to do between different colours of paint. Taping and painting the beams the terracotta colour has been a nightmare but well worth the result. We hauled the eight 30kg packages of the newly arrived wardrobes upstairs, had a much needed shower and set off to see if any friends were having a drink at Bar Pablo at 7pm. We were in luck, and all soon headed to Quattrocento (the pizza restaurant below our apartment) for a meal. All good - until about 2am that is. Then all hell let loose. I started throwing up first, closely followed by John, and we continued in tandem until about 10am. If one heaved, that set the other off. I know we do most things together but one on edge side of the bed respectively chucking into our bowls is taking it a little too far. Oh what a night. At one stage we were counting to see who had the most heaves but we lost count at about 9 each - we were past caring and just wanted to die. John thinks it was probably norovirus because it was particularly nasty. We had had a similar experience after food poisoning at my father's 90th birthday party in Auckland a few years ago.

We basically lay pathetically in bed all morning, and slowly started to feel a bit better during the afternoon. It's now 9pm and I've managed to keep a cup of tea down so far but John has gone one better and had a few spoonfuls of sorbet and heated up some frozen beans in the microwave as we still have no kitchen. We haven't heard if any of our friends have suffered yet but from postings on Facebook it doesn't appear so. John and I shared two pizzas so I guess it must have been something in or on one of those. It's just as well the builder didn't turn up early today - if he had he might have turned tail and raced off again.

Tomorrow we hope to feel a lot better and would love to get the wardrobes in our bedroom and the spare room up and running. Then we could clear a whole lot of stuff from off the floor which would be just magic.