IKEA - Long Live the Home (once they get their Customer Service right!)

On Cyber Monday last year, IKEA had a promotion of free delivery. This was an offer too good to miss, so I tapped away online and ordered a new bed and some other items. Ordinarily, we would struggle outside the store on a rainy Sunday afternoon, straining, lifting and cursing while trying to balance the ridiculously oversized piece of furniture we'd just bought on to the car roof.
I did experience a few issues whilst ordering online and all was going smoothly until it gave me a delivery date of 3 days before we took possession of our house. The page was stuck and I couldn't alter it in any way, so I resorted to their Customer Help line - ugh!
The woman was painfully slow and repeated everything I said at least 3 times before entering them on her system. She then took it upon herself to keep offering me alternatives, such as size, colour etc. I had already made up my mind and knew exactly what I wanted, so I found this all very irritating.
After what seemed like a decade later, she clicked the button to give me my delivery date,  I asked for a few days after we took possession in mid-December.
There was a long un-nerving silence, then she spoke to tell me that my delivery date would be January 8th, between 9am and 9pm. What? How could that be? She explained that they were very busy and all the delivery slots had been filled whilst we had been talking (more like she had been wasting my life). Anyway, I had no choice so she e-mailed me the details.
To my horror, my husband informed me some weeks later that his Christmas Party for work was on that very date and it started at 5.30pm.


Visions of my new bed faded as I picked up the phone to Ikea Customer Service Dept. again and asked for a new delivery date. I did think he would offer me a date in 2018, so I considered myself fortunate when he gave me a delay of just 2 weeks.
Due to the stupidly long time to wait, I've gone and bought my daughter's chest of drawers already and then asked if I could change the order and remove it. Not possible, so they will deliver it straight in to my car and I'll take it back for a refund - what a waste of time, money and effort. I am still looking forward to our new bed though and some bar stools too.
If I'm really lucky, the delivery guys might even offer to carry the enormous bed up the stairs for me without taking a few chunks of plaster out of the wall corners. If I smile sweetly, they might take their snowy boots off too before traipsing across our new carpet.
Anyway, I'm not the most patient of people and it seems like I ordered these things from them last century. I feel we've been waiting forever. I think next time I'll hire a van and go and collect the items from the store myself.
Oh yes, I can picture it now, raining or blowing snow as my husband and I argue whether the item will fit in or on the van as my daughter gnaws away at an Ikea hot dog and our blood pressure soars to a dangerously high level - IKEA, you could make our lives so much easier....

RIP My Trusted Acer Laptop

A few days ago I switched on the laptop as normal and waited for the screen to light up. After about 10 minutes I began to realise something was wrong...
I tried and tried but to no avail. I used my phone to access the internet to see if anyone had a remedy. There were plenty but none worked. I fiddled with the battery, drained the laptop and tried again - nothing. My heart sank.

What is it about these machines we own that makes us feel like we've lost a long lost friend when they break? We'd had this laptop for 6 years and though it had crashed a few times, almost everything I've written or photographed was on there.

I reluctantly took it in to a local computer shop and left it with them. Luckily I'd bought a 'Passport' years ago to back up information etc, so I took that in along with the Recovery discs.

I received the fateful call. There was nothing they could do to repair the laptop, but they had retrieved all of my files - horray!

I almost cried when they bought it out to show me, it was in bits and so was I.

The reason for its demise? Apart from old age, it was full of dust. The fan stopped working and couldn't cool the inside down sufficiently, so it fried itself. That's what living on a dirt road for 6 years does to laptops I was informed.

So now I am sitting in front of a new sturdy computer with a keyboard and mouse that just doesn't feel the same. I have had to try and create shortcuts on to the desktop and have failed miserably.

I want Google back, not Bing. I want to see all things familiar when I switch on, not weird and wonderful upgrades that I don't understand nor will ever use.

Wow, I can't believe I'm so stuck in my ways and I'm not even a 'Senior' yet! Just call me Victor Meldrew and I won't be offended......

Happy New Year!

I was sauntering around Walmart yesterday, taking my time to browse whilst the majority of shoppers around me looked more like a National Emergency was about to occur. They were dragging groceries from shelves like things possessed and I felt a bit left out of the frenzy.
I walked down the 'chip' aisle, that's crisps to my UK readers, of course chips are French fries and crisp here is crumble. Got it? Anyway an assistant was laughing that she'd never seen the chip aisle looking so empty and commented that the locals would be celebrating New Year's Eve with 'chips and alcohol' - nothing wrong with that!





As I wandered round I heard an announcement and my heart sank. It was asking for all trained cashiers to report to Customer Services. That's always a bad sign - I had visions of queues 10 deep at each check out. A few minutes later, another voice boomed over the loudspeaker that anyone with less than 15 items could pay for them at Customer Services - another bad sign. I felt even worse when they repeated both over the next 10 minutes.
By the time I meandered to the checkout, it wasn't so bad but I wondered why everyone was buying so much when the store is open the following day. Beats me.
Anyway, today, New Year's Day, we cleared the garage. It was a mammoth task moving all the boxes of clutter out of there to another location. I do admit to having a small pile of 'stuff' in the middle of the basement floor that I promise solemnly to sort this year and get rid of the majority of it.
Tonight our cars are languishing in a cosy garage, something mine has never known since we bought it. I can almost hear them snoring.....




Well Happy New Year to everyone and may all your dreams for 2016 come true.

Good Ol' Canada Post!

My daughter is very lucky and has gifts sent to her from friends and family on birthdays and Christmas.
She always writes her thank you letters eventually - perhaps not as quickly as I'd like her to, but this year I had a secret weapon.
Every 1st January, Canada Post increases their postal rates, at least they always have since we came here. This year for some reason I ended up with too many international stamps at $2.50 each and knowing the price increase was imminent, I asked my daughter to write all her letters before the deadline of 1st January.





She dutifully wrote them all and kindly let me address the envelopes, stick on the stamps, air mail stickers and return address labels.
Yesterday we proudly walked in to the post office with our batch of 2015 priced letters only to be told that there was to be a price freeze in 2016 and it was to remain the same! My daughter's face was a picture as I meekly apologised! How was I to know?
Anyway, she now has the rest of her holiday to enjoy herself as she continues to unpack a million boxes of keepsakes and junk and no long has to worry about her thank you letters! I bet next year she'll check on-line first before she puts pen to paper on Boxing Day....

How to De-Clutter in 10 Easy Steps

You may be familiar with those hoarding programmes on television where we sit back and watch someone else's misery and hopefully watch their recovery too. How many of us sit there and gloat thinking we are polar opposites of that unfortunate person?
Well I always thought that. I don't hoard. I'm not minimalist either. I just don't like to run out of things so I like to have a supply of stuff we regularly use.
That's my excuse anyway.

We moved from UK some years ago and I sorted through boxes in the attic then. Ok, so some of the things I wanted to keep may seem a bit obscure, but I bought every national newspaper the day Princess Diana died and kept them in a box. I'm not sure why, but I still have them all. Other stuff like a Royal Doulton dinner service that has been used perhaps 4 times in 20 years - that takes up at least 5 boxes. When my daughter was at nursery school in UK, there were a few outbreaks of nits, so in anticipation, I bought a Boots electronic nit comb - it's still in the box, unused.


My point is that we paid a company to come to our house and pack all this unused stuff carefully into boxes. This unused stuff was then shipped, at great expense across the Atlantic. This unused stuff was then unpacked in our new home where it has sat, still unused for 6 years.
Stupidly, I then packed it all up again and we have just driven hundreds of miles with it across the country, packed it into a heated storage unit, unloaded it in to our garage a month later and now I'm mulling over whether or not to keep it!

I have set aside a section of our basement for garage sale stuff. I'm very enthusiastic about it and intend to get the whole street on board to ensure maximum footfall.
Some stuff just isn't saleable though. How about all those masterpieces my daughter painted when she was 3 years old? How could I be so heartless and throw those out? I know the experts say take photos of your treasured possessions. Do you know how many boxes I have of photo albums? Literally over 30 and they each weigh a ton!


So my advice to you is this;


Step 1 - You've got to be in the right frame of mind to de-clutter. If you don't feel like purging, then try it tomorrow.


Step 2 - Start with one box, or one room and one corner of that room. Think small and you'll achieve more than if you try and tackle too much at once.


Step 3 - Toss, keep, sell or donate? If you know you'll use it in the next year, keep it. If it's broken or outdated (like VHS videos or worse, Betamax) toss it out. If you can sell it, box it up for a garage sale, car boot sale or advertise it online or in the paper. If none of the above apply, donate it.


Step 4 - Get rid of duplicates. If your best deluxe stapler should misfire, then new ones really don't cost a lot. You don't need a back-up!


Step 5 - Do you keep unread magazines or worse, ones you have read? Get rid of them straight away! I have boxes of DIY Handyman that I would need if we still lived in a fixer upper. We don't, so they're going.


Step 6 - Think about the energy it takes to keep all this stuff dust-free. If you love nick-nacks and don't mind dusting them every week, then keep them. Don't hang on to them as it looks bare without them. Space is good!


Step 7 - Do you think, 'but great aunt Maud gave me that', feeling guilty as she died long ago? Well she won't mind if you decide to sell or donate it. She'll be grateful you loved it for as long as you did and respect your decision to move on. Do you need those old pieces to remember your loved one? Does a piece of china really bring back hundreds of fond memories? If not, get rid.


Step 8 - If decision-making really isn't your strong point and you can't part with anything, look at 3 or 4 items and decide to get rid of one. If you do this on a regular basis, then after a year you may be on your way to living clutter-free.


Step 9 - Are you ever planning on moving house? If so, you might as well save yourself a ton of money and get rid of anything you have stashed in your shed, attic or basement. The cost of packing it, storing it and moving it prove that it makes financial sense to sell it now.


Step 10 - If you are, shall we say, a senior citizen. I know it can be a comfort to have all things familiar around you. How about that cute little doll your grandchild made from a cardboard toilet-roll, wool and scraps of material? You don't need a keepsake to think fondly of your family/friends do you? Pick up the phone and talk to them or grab the photo album and take a trip down memory lane (assuming you haven't thrown out all your photos!)

What's a Family Christmas without Some Chaos?

Well it's over for another year, I'm sad because this year we didn't have the big build-up to Christmas the way we usually do. We moved in to our new home 10 days before Christmas - I make that sound like an seamless, easy task. The truth is that we loaded at least a million boxes from the storage unit into a rented van, drove them 2 miles and dumped them into our garage. Then we repeated this procedure until the storage unit was empty and the garage was full.


No logistical expert could have foreseen the biting cold wind we had to endure, the numb fingers and toes and the empty stomach feeling you get when you realise you've forgotten to eat all day.
Still, we did it! Anyway amidst the 6' high piles of boxes lurked our Christmas decorations, tree, wreath, lights etc.


Normally we would have everything up and lit by the beginning of December but by the time we unearthed the majority of the boxes, it was the 22nd!
Undeterred, we found one set of lights and strung them on to the well-travelled tree and my daughter did the rest. It looked beautiful regardless of the rush to get it ready.





The big day went well, I put the turkey in the oven at 8am and spoke to family across the world via Facetime in between peeling veggies and making bread sauce.
Everything was going great until it was time to serve up. A stray glass of 7Up launched itself across the table causing a panic to mop it up before it wrecked the new floor. We ate the meal and thoroughly enjoyed it (apart from the parsnips ending up rather burnt). I then realised my mobile phone wasn't charging though it was plugged in, the charger suddenly decided to die on me. An hour or so later I could hear a weird clicking noise coming from the basement. No, it wasn't a squirrel, it was worse than that - it was the hot water tank! Easy fix, switch it off....


I then decided I could iron a few curtains upstairs before bedtime as they were hung in haste and looked like they'd just fallen out of the packaging - well they had! In fact when I brought them home, I had no idea where my iron was hiding in the garage box jungle. By bedtime I was aching and tired but happy and content that nothing worse had gone wrong on Christmas Day!


Although we were given the names and numbers of emergency call-out electricians etc. when we moved in, I just didn't have the heart to ring anyone on Christmas Day and drag them away from their family. Today, I have switched the water tank back on and will ring someone to come and hopefully fix it. Mind you, they would probably have been grateful for yesterday's call-out fee?


Happy Boxing Day and may it go smoother than yesterday.....

Beware Clicking the 'Book' Button

Well amidst the chaos of choosing which mobile phone company, cable company, internet provider, home phone etc, I have found a spare 10 minutes to tell you about our road trip over here.

We didn't sleep well the night before the move. My back had seized up and my shoulders were up by my ears causing a migraine. My husband tutted a lot and kept shaking his head as he glanced over the never ending sealed boxes I kept packing and placing near the back door!

Somehow we squeezed and squashed as much into the van as possible - sadly, we ordered the smaller of the 2 large vans so I had to make a quick call and collect the largest trailer they had in stock  -  an 8' x 10' and even that wasn't big enough! My neighbour kindly offered part of her garage for us to store non-essential items in like our bicycles, ladders etc.
We did leave quite a lot of things behind too. Nothing too precious though, just tatty garden furniture that we'd had for years and some shelving that we didn't have time to take apart.





I do love road trips. I prefer ones that allow me more preparation and time. We didn't have this luxury on the day of the move though. I would normally make a picnic with freshly baked quiche, sandwiches, crisps and fruit. We decided to buy food from wherever we had to stop - the old joke about garage sandwiches is still valid after all these years, an egg sandwich I bravely bought in the middle of nowhere looked like someone had trodden on it and though I have no idea what they put in it, I could taste it for hours after - talk about value for money!
The drive was really fun. My daughter opted to travel with me for a couple of reasons - we enjoy the same modern pop music and don't mind each other singing our hearts out. She decided against travelling with my husband who finds enjoyment listening to football and cricket matches.


The road across Canada does not have the most interesting terrain. In fact, I felt like I was in a movie with the same backdrop being cranked alongside our car. We drove for hours and hours and hours. We had to stay one night and decided to pick a hotel with a restaurant so we could relax and enjoy a glass of wine after all the travelling. I dumbly clicked the 'Book' button on my phone and the room was paid for in full with no cancellation refund.....
The hotel was in a capital city and as we pulled in to the car park I hoped the trailer and cars would all still be there in the morning. It looked rough but as I'd booked this dump, I cheerfully smiled at my family as they both looked disappointedly at where we'd stopped.
We booked in to reception and asked where the restaurant was. It was attached to the hotel, a very mediocre family diner that served endless coffee, pop, water, but no alcohol. The hotel employee happily pointed to the door nearby telling us there was a licensed bar but our daughter would have to wait outside. As he spoke a rough-looking character stumbled out of the door and staggered through the main door of the hotel - nice.
I opened the door to our room with caution. It looked ok on the photos... the carpet near the door was noticeably darker than the rest and I could only walk in slowly as I unstuck my feet from the carpet - not nice. There was a distinct lack of power outlets in the room too though some clever person came up with the idea of screwing an extension cord to the wall, ingenious but probably illegal.









The food was barely edible, the pop was watered down and the other clientele were playing a family game of cards, whilst shouting at each other very loudly.
Thankfully our vehicles were intact the next day and we carried on with our adventure.


 The scenery carried on and on and on.....


Eventually we arrived at our destination and I was so thankful that the weather had remained dry and sunny for the 2 days. Normally at that time of year, it would be snowing and blowing across the highway.
The following day we unloaded everything in to a storage unit and again the weather was dry. We had finally moved!
Our new home won't be ready until next week and I have booked all the service providers, furniture delivery etc for the few days after we move in. I'm just wondering how efficient they will all be and how high my blood pressure can rise to..... now where did I put those migraine tablets?