A moving moment

Regular readers of this blog will know that the Grumpy Goat and his Beloved are getting married in August. We're also both moving house, condensing the contents of two completely independent two-bedroom flats into one three bedroom villa. Owing to its situation: exactly halfway between where Beloved and I go to work, we've ended up in Mirdif. Or possibly Mirdiff. And not Midriff.

I was impertinent enough to have visited the place while it was occupied by the previous tenant and check all the rooms' dimensions. It is a lot easier to move furniture around in AutoCAD than physically heaving it around the building after paying the removal men to shift it.

"On second thoughts, the grand piano might be better downstairs after all." Quite. None of that, thank you. By being a little bit clever, we've in theory managed to fit all our stuff into the new place, except for one bed set that I've agreed with the new tenant of my current flat in Grumpy Goat Towers I'll leave behind. The new family is upgrading from one to two bedrooms and a free bed set looks like a good idea.

Anyway, we got access in early July. The place was desperate for a clean, the kitchen needing particular attention. The landlord will apparently do nothing, so out came the moribund built-in oven leaving the deposits of at least seven years of cooking on the walls behind. I shall install my own cooker in the space.

Now cookers come in two standard sizes: 60cm or 90cm wide. There are odd 80cm wide, but these don't come with closed-door grilling and electric oven ignition. I hate and detest grovelling in front of the oven or grill with a lighted match or its equivalent. Guess how wide the gap between the kitchen units is. 90cm? 80cm? No, wrong. It is in fact 89cm. What kind of imbecile builds a brick-and-tile kitchen (so you can't shove the cupboards along a bit) and makes the oven gap one centimetre too small? I have had two fun evenings with a hammer and cold chisel, removing the tiles to try to create a 90cm gap and then plastering over the raw concrete to make it smooth. Broken ceramic tiles are ferociously sharp, I have discovered.

The professional cleaners came in this afternoon and gave the entire villa the scrubbing that it hasn't experienced in a long time. Beloved has selected paint colours and the painters are going to arrive tomorrow, it is alleged. Everything must be clean (done) and painted before we start to install furniture next week. It would be nice if the air conditioning worked too. All the split units seem to function except for the one in the kitchen that seems to be totally FUBAR. We're promised that all the aircons will be serviced and working before we officially move in.

I'm instructed by Beloved that some of the kitchen units will have to go. I can't figure out how they're built. I suspect that frames were screwed to the walls and steel boxes were then pop-riveted together, making removing the cupboards a major undertaking. If only the cupboards were deeper, then we'd only have to replace the doors. Still, I have power tools... We also need to replace a lot of the hideous and/or broken light fittings, and to figure out which switch works each part of the building. When Phil The Greek made his comment about electrical wiring a few years back he might just possibly have been referring to our villa.