The Road To Warwick 2

And today, we bought a kitchen. Well, to be precise, I bought a kitchen, because I am the only one with a credit card, and a credit card is the only thing that can absorb a �1200 IKEA Bill without prior arrangements being made. The arrangements will instead be made post, in round about a month's time, or whenever the VISA bill turns up. Hopefully not in the middle of all the moving chaos.

Not only did we buy the kitchen units, we also bought the kitchen table along with a bench and two chairs for the table. We don't seem quite ready to sort out the lighting. We might have managed it if we'd tried, but it was getting quite late by then and sanity was dwindling.

Perhaps I should take a few steps back here. Then things will make more sense.

We started out early, making trips to both Powerhouse and Currys to look at cookers (at this point we hadn't decided on whether to have an integrated cooker or a separate one), and then called into a kitchen place in Stratford to see what kind of deals they offered. They weren't the 'give you a quote on the spot' type of place though, so we moved on.

Our ultimate destination was IKEA, because by then we had narrowed down the list of one potential kitchen to just one potential kitchen. IKEA is in the same part of the world (or same part of the Midlands) as the delightful Merry Hill shopping centre, which, as catalogued on previous occasions, is also Anne's neck of the woods. So we met Anne for lunch at Merry Hill, and, predictably, had lunch in Starbucks. Alison, as usual, disappeared off into TK Maxx while Anne and I chatted and watched each other get distracted by the totty that was behind the other one.

When we met up again later, Alison needed to make a foray into a card shop, and on going through the posters Anne and I got stuck on a Holly Valance poster. There was a comedy moment there involving us staring at this poster and Alison reading from the poster opposite, but it would take far too much effort to explain and if you have a problem with that, well, who's writing this diary, eh?

We made a return trip to Starbucks and then afterwards I had finally gathered the courage to do the kitchen thing (by this time, apparently, Alison had decided she was ready to do the kitchen thing and was just waiting for me to get up off my arse). Anne came along to IKEA too, and because she knew the back way got there long before we did.

IKEA is a weird place. You can spend loads and loads of time there, and even then you don't seem to have had time enough to see it all - it's a bit like Disneyland in that respect, I guess.

By this time we'd reached a decision on the cooker, in that we'd go for a separate upright one rather than an integrated one. This involved me conceding a point, but I'm old enough and grown up enough now to do this without sulking :-D

So, in amongst ordering the kitchen, and getting paranoid about our measurements for the worktops, a number of other things happened.

The three of us tried out lots of chairs, trying to work out which design would go best with the table and bench (which we actually chose on Alison's birthday).

Anne (and me as well, I must confess) was finding sexual potential in almost everything in the store (especially the machines they have on display showing how they test their stuff for wear and tear). She actually got close to freaking me out, I think.

We people-watched. There's a fair chance that other people were also people-watching, and wondered why a group of three (I avoid a certain other word, for obvious reasons) were buying a kitchen.

And we all managed to resist the urge to buy un-needed (but practical all the same) crap. IKEA is full of this stuff. Stuff you pick up and think "that's a really good idea" and if you're lucky you'll realise you don't actually need before you reach the checkouts. Some of it is really really cool, and some of it we may yet go back and get, but none of it was particularly vital.

So, anyway, let's look at the scoreboard.

• Solicitor paid off: Tick!
• Life Assurance etc arranged: Semi-Tick
• Cable TV/Phone/Internet transfer arranged: Tick!
• Focus Homebuyers discount card blagged: Tick!
• Paint Bought: Tick!
• Wallpaper: *THRRPT*
• Gas/Electricity Transfer arranged: *THRRPT*
• Hire Van booked for moving day: *THRRPT*
• Kitchen ordered: Tick!
• Packing completed: *THRRPT*
• Fed up with packing: Tick!
• All necessary change-of-address stuff done: *THRRPT*

The wallpaper point is now irrelevant, as our fruitless trip to Homebase on Thursday night lead us to decide to just paint the bedroom, and use some stencils. However, just before our rather disappointing appointment with MFI last night I had time to pop into Focus and buy the bathroom light and ladder that we ran out of time to get on Thursday.

Tomorrow's to-do list has packing (as much as possible, would be handy to get it mostly finished tomorrow if at all feasible), choosing paint for the bedroom, buying a cooker, and buying carpets. Come to think of it, there's electrical stuff to get too. The list never ends...