Furniture

July 22 - July 29 2007

one of the first things we had to do before our move was buy ALL the furniture. there were built-in cupboards in our mountain flat and that was it; no fridge, no bed, no washing machine, NOTHING. so, we decided to go to IKEA. we had a long list and spent about 2 hours going through the entire store - me being pushed in the wheelchair - dutifully writing down names and ID numbers for all the items we wanted. finally, we arrived at the ordering area. there were two guys on computers recording what people were ordering and when they wanted it delivered.

two guys?! not nearly enough. but, we had no choice, we waited for about half an hour before we got to order our furniture. we started going through everything painfully slowly. half an hour into the process we got told "oh sorry, we don't have the mattress you want." hmmm ... okay, there was another one that was also okay, so colin ran halfway back through the store to find the other mattress and get the ID number while i continued going through our extensive list with the computer guy. we got the ID number for the other mattress and then got told, "oh sorry, we dont have the bed you want."

and that was the end of my self-control right there. we had, by then spent 4 hours in IKEA only to discover that the main reason we had gone there in the first place; to buy a decent bed (which is difficult to find as most taiwanese mattresses are rock- like) was the one thing that they didn't have! not only this, but that they were so incompetent, so thoughtless that they kept out of stock items on display and then couldn't even be bothered to put a warning 'sold out' sticker on them. and the worst part of all of this was that colin had gone to that very store the day before and spoken to someone in the bed department who had encouraged him to buy that very same bed and mattress!

i must have been an interesting site. a foreign female, in a tartan wheelchair, flanked by her 2 m tall boyfriend, screaming at an IKEA worker in chinese about how lazy and disgusting his store was. naturally we both stormed out shouting about how much they had wasted our time (we both have very volatile tempers ;-). we phoned and made an official complaint about how badly the place was run and then vowed never to set foot in an IKEA ever again and to warn all our friends against the place. so far, we had spent a day at IKEA and come out with no furniture, but with MUCH higher blood pressure.

our only other option was to trawl the second-hand furniture stores near our flat. this was very hard on colin physically as he had to push my wheelchair around uneven and often non-existent sidewalks in the middle of taiwan summer: temperature 36 C; humidity 80%. we spent a day missioning around looking for good deals and honest salesmen, arranging deliveries and making deals in chinese while poor colin sweated off half his body weight. eventually, after a whole lot of bickering we found everything that we wanted. we managed to convince one salesman to shorten the legs of a coffe table for us and another salesman to come to our old apartment and help us move our existing furniture as well as what we had bought from him. dates were arranged and times set. well done sue and colin!

we could finally relax about the furniture, we had everything under control and had done it all in chinese. no problem! right?!