So, I wouldn’t exactly say that the move went smoothly. There were a number of key elements that needed to take place on the 28th before we moved in on the 29th… and pretty much none of them happened with the exception of our lovely beam on the main floor.

No carpets, no electrical hook up, no new refrigerator. At least the movers showed up!

Handy hint: apparently the temperature in your home needs to be a balmy 78 degrees to install wool carpeting. Since it’s a natural fibre it needs to be warm enough to stretch otherwise you’ll have buckling when things do warm up. I would have appreciated knowing this ahead of time.

The carpet was to have been installed in the morning. I had called the day before to find out exactly what time they would be arriving and to notify them that it would be best to install during the day time as we had limited lighting (hook up of new wiring was to happen on Thursday morning- move in day). A sales person at Giant Carpet told me that they’d call me back after 4 p.m with the exact time. No phone call.

By 9:00am on Wednesday morning I called the sales person that I had been dealing with directly on her cell phone and she called me back to say that the installers car had broken down so they had re-scheduled the installation for Thursday morning (!). I expressed that this was unacceptable as we were moving in on Thursday and somehow she managed to find another installer to come out the same day. Long story short- they came and went because it was not hot enough. Spencer called the electrician in from another job so that he could hook up a heater in anticipation for installation for the next morning… which didn’t happen either! Over many phone calls and many different stories from installers and sales people we weren’t able to get the carpet installed until today (Saturday). Apparently it’s happening and is looking good- we don’t know first hand as we’ve escaped to Kirk’s parent’s cottage.

The electrician scheduled to come in on Thursday morning to hook up all of the new wiring put his back out and so this was also delayed until today to be done by someone else. We had one live outlet in the kitchen to work with and ran extension cords with trouble lights to different parts of the house.

And finally, our refrigerator arrived only to have them tell us that in order for them to get it up our stairs and into our kitchen on the second floor they would require more man power… this would require re-scheduling through Sears (and the removal of the trim around the window in our stairwell). We opted to scrub the filthy existing fridge to use until our main floor kitchen is ready.

In between all of this was the plain madness of moving- scrubbing the new house and old, juggling taking care of the kids, as well as moving everything in and trying to figure out how it all will fit!