Our Ship's Come In! (where do we put it?)

We came home late one night and found this sign and tape in front of our apartment building: finally, a notice that said our moving truck would deliver our goods -- 12/11/2022 (November 12) between 08:30h and 14:00h. This was ten days hence, what the city requires, but fell on a Saturday which seemed suspicious but our moving company, Flippers.es, confirmed it. 

We had already taken apart one section of the sofa that came with the flat: it was too big to fit in the elevator, fortunately the remaining section came apart with simple bolts so we didn't have to hack at it like the previous piece. The living room looks quite large now, it should easily accommodate our furniture... right??

Just before 9am, the movers arrived. The contract was to "unpack, and put everything on any flat surface". We thought that meant they would put all the individual items on surfaces, but realized there was simply no way the contents of our 67 boxes would fit on the horizontal planes of the house. We neglected to get photos of the truck or guy(s) down below unloading and loading the elevator, but our guy unloading the elevator gave us boxes, unsealed them, and we frantically unwrapped and put individual items wherever we could find a space -- we were barely able to keep up.  The first item to arrive was my bicycle; the wheel would arrive a couple hours later. Then everything else started coming up quickly, in random order.

Stuff was strewn all around the flat, waiting for us to give them order. By 12:30, the final piece was brought in, the Brazilian sofa as one massive paper-wrapped item -- it barely fit in the elevator. For the first time since buying the apartment years ago, we finally had a comfortable place to sit and relax.

Sadly, two of the artworks suffered damage. This was especially disappointing because we'd paid to have custom wooden crates made for both. A large framed lithograph by Bruce Conner had cracked glass, which grew to span the entire frame in 24 hours, and risked cutting into the artwork.

The other piece I bought from artist Marcia Fry at Artomatic 2012. It's a rich assemblage of "found objects": the top spire was broken off, and the library of miniature Shakespeare books was tossed asunder. 

One of my VMPS speakers had an adjustment knob sheared off which prevents me from tuning the sound to match our new room, but this probably isn't that big of a deal. I had insurance on the shipment and have already filled in the claim forms, and am waiting to hear back. I hope they'll pay for a good framing shop to provide UV-blocking non-glare "museum glass", and I'll ask Marcia for her suggestions to fix "Saint Germain". 

We've gotta find room to hang all the art work, and only have one non-glass wall in the house. Most of it is black and white, or shades of gray, or very muted tones, and we've got one very large intensely blue and yellow canvas Bethe Bronson painted years ago. It'll be a bit cramped for my aesthetic but we'll make it work.  

We've moved from a 16x27 foot kitchen (with 106 drawer and door pulls) into a space that's quite small (by our standards), with cabinets that were designed for style rather than function: there are no drawers and very few shelves. To provide home for most of the stuff strewn over our table and cooktop, I started with the four wall cabinets.  These came with 2 shelves each, evenly spaced, which held very little and couldn't even accommodate some oversized wine glasses we have.  

We learned something from designing two kitchens that I never see mentioned about shelf spacing: to provide accessibility, put short things at the bottom, tall things at the top -- this seems counter-intuitive but we find you can grasp the bottoms of the tall things even if they're high up.  I made some estimates and figured we could add 7 shelves to the existing 7. We'd moved the existing dish drain board down directly over the hole in the cabinet bottom so we could drip dry delicate things that would be damaged by the dishwasher (my parents' wedding crystal with a silver rim would be eaten by detergent). We made another trip to FUSDEC with a drawing of what I needed: the cabinet widths were not uniform so I spec'd a couple of different widths; he told us they'd be ready "tomorrow morning". Seven shelves for under 7€ a piece, with laminate edge banding on the front -- a very fair price.

I spent the rest of the day determining heights based on contents, marking and drilling 5mm holes for mounting pegs. We picked up the shelves and 32 support pegs and got to work, iteratively adding a shelf, populating it with glassware, plates, etc, and repeating until we had accessible locations for everything.

We repeated this for the remaining 3 cabinets and now are able to hold our glassware, cocktail shaker, coffee pots, prep plates, platters, and my parents' wedding china (which we use daily). Everything's accessible except for rarely used items at the very top -- very acceptable.

 

Next up: we've gotta add drawers to the two door-front cabinets to hold flatware, knives, kitchen tools, utensils, spatulae, and all the other paraphernalia needed by us avid cooks.