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kareinaWhen last I posted we were pretty much done with our time in Glasgow. I had attempted to post a package back to Sweden, and found out that surface mail to the rest of Europe from the UK isn't an option and I didn't like the price for air mailing a 10 kg box (£68). One of my FB friends in Edinburgh commented that it is possible to find private shippers who do surface stuff, and suggested the web page for one of them. Sadly, due to not having internet while on the train, we didn't have time to follow up on that till Saturday morning, when the web page was open, but the business was not. Indeed, they claimed only £25 to ship a 10 kg box to northern Sweden. However, they also said that the shipping itself would be via UPS, and their web page said more like 3 or 4 times that amount (I don't recall the exact number--we checked several places). At the end of the day we double checked the SAS web page, which said that excess baggage was 20 or 30€, depending on. Therefore we opted to just take the box home with us. Sadly, when we got to the airport we found out that the first flight of the trip, from Edinburgh to Copenhagen, was not with SAS at all, but some other carrier, and they charge £155 for an extra piece of luggage. Sadly, there was no post office at the airport, and we had taken a bus out there, so there was no one to take the box away for us, so we were left with only the choices of paying their fee, throwing the box away, or not flying.So we wound up paying way more than if we had just posted the darn thing from Glasgow. If only we had known that the first flight was with a "partner" airline, we would have checked their web page.
However, despite the huge fee to bring home the stuff that has been at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clovis_t's house for a year, I am still delighted to have it here. What did I rescue? Fabric! Some black wool of the same sort that we used to make my light-weight winter coat, which we will probably use to make him one as well (this is fabric I brought with me from Australia--one of the few pieces of my fabric that hadn't been in the suitcase that the shippers lost on the move to Italy. Linen! Lots of it. When I was packing stuff to leave Italy I decided that since seven years had elapsed since my step father had died and I still hadn't made use of his kiln and boxes of enameling powder and stack of books on the topic it was time to find them a new home, where they would actually be used. I asked on an email list, and found a lady in the UK who wanted them, and was willing to offer fabric. Therefore clovis_t dropped it off, and picked up the fabric, on his way back to Edinburgh with the rest of my stuff (recall that the plans to store stuff at his place were made before I fell in love with lord_kjar and decided to move to Sweden. However, when clovis_t shipped my boxes here last March he forgot the fabric, which wasn't in a box, and he also forgot 1 small box which contained miscellaneous yarn and sewing accessories, and my old computer.
The only problem with bringing this stuff home is that the shelves in the kitchen where the fabric and sewing stuff lives was already full. However, I lead a charmed life. On Wednesdaylord_kjar and I got to go looting. The company for which he works has been moving to a new location (which, much to our delight, is only a 15 minute walk from our home, just beyond the uni, so he can walk to work with me in the morning). They are an IT company that fixes and maintains computer systems for other companies, and years ago part of that service included fixing some of the internal bits that, these days, are simply replaced. Therefore they had some stacks of wooden drawers that used to be necessary for holding small replacement parts which were no longer needed. So, with the permission of his boss, we went on a raid and came home with those drawers, a set of sturdy wooden shelves, a coat rack, and a cart on wheels.
The cart is now in the server closet holding the tourney chest and large wicker box that we keep food in at camping events, which makes it easier to move them aside to get to the garb hanging from the rack that is also in that closet. The bookshelf is awaiting the departure of the boxes of darkroom stuff from the corner of the living room, and the set of small drawers is sitting on the chest of drawers in the hallway, with the massage table above them.
The drawers turn out to be perfect for organizing stuff. There are 3 dozen drawers in the stack. They are long enough that one of them contains rulers and drafting supplies. Their depth is perfect for organizing spools of thread (cut lengths of cardboard split the drawers into four troughs so that thread stays in nice, colour-coordinated order. Another drawer now has scissors, wax, tailor's chalk, and other sewing accessories. We have one for embroidery floss, one for ink and calligraphy stuff, one for drawing supplies, another for ordinary pens and pencils. Some contain nails and screws and the like, while others contain small boxes of tools. We have only filled just over half of the drawers so far, which is good, because I am certain that further cleaning and organizing will yield more things that need to go into them.
Can I tell you how nice it is to be living with someone who agrees that a fun thing to do on a Friday evening is to clean and organize stuff? It is fun to work together, one cutting cardboard strips, the other inserting them into drawers and arranging the thread in colour order (one drawer for the good threads (cotton, linen, and silk), and one for the bad threads which are still useful for temporary basting stuff together (cotton-covered poly and polyester). We see eye to eye on questions like what things go into the same drawer, and what needs different drawers. Once we'd done filling drawers we had enough room on the shelves to put the fabric on them, and the kitchen table was clean and empty for the first time in weeks, and we were both happy!
I am terribly pleased with the luck we have had in finding free or cheap furniture to help organize our stuff since I moved in. Oddly enough, each time we have acquired a new piece we think that it makes a huge difference to have it, but that the house is now full, and there is no more room for other new furniture, but then we find another, realize that there is, in fact room for it, and there is, and it makes a huge improvement. But this time I think that we really are full and don't have room for anything else...
However, despite the huge fee to bring home the stuff that has been at
clovis_t's house for a year, I am still delighted to have it here. What did I rescue? Fabric! Some black wool of the same sort that we used to make my light-weight winter coat, which we will probably use to make him one as well (this is fabric I brought with me from Australia--one of the few pieces of my fabric that hadn't been in the suitcase that the shippers lost on the move to Italy. Linen! Lots of it. When I was packing stuff to leave Italy I decided that since seven years had elapsed since my step father had died and I still hadn't made use of his kiln and boxes of enameling powder and stack of books on the topic it was time to find them a new home, where they would actually be used. I asked on an email list, and found a lady in the UK who wanted them, and was willing to offer fabric. Therefore clovis_t dropped it off, and picked up the fabric, on his way back to Edinburgh with the rest of my stuff (recall that the plans to store stuff at his place were made before I fell in love with lord_kjar and decided to move to Sweden. However, when clovis_t shipped my boxes here last March he forgot the fabric, which wasn't in a box, and he also forgot 1 small box which contained miscellaneous yarn and sewing accessories, and my old computer.The only problem with bringing this stuff home is that the shelves in the kitchen where the fabric and sewing stuff lives was already full. However, I lead a charmed life. On Wednesday
lord_kjar and I got to go looting. The company for which he works has been moving to a new location (which, much to our delight, is only a 15 minute walk from our home, just beyond the uni, so he can walk to work with me in the morning). They are an IT company that fixes and maintains computer systems for other companies, and years ago part of that service included fixing some of the internal bits that, these days, are simply replaced. Therefore they had some stacks of wooden drawers that used to be necessary for holding small replacement parts which were no longer needed. So, with the permission of his boss, we went on a raid and came home with those drawers, a set of sturdy wooden shelves, a coat rack, and a cart on wheels. The cart is now in the server closet holding the tourney chest and large wicker box that we keep food in at camping events, which makes it easier to move them aside to get to the garb hanging from the rack that is also in that closet. The bookshelf is awaiting the departure of the boxes of darkroom stuff from the corner of the living room, and the set of small drawers is sitting on the chest of drawers in the hallway, with the massage table above them.
The drawers turn out to be perfect for organizing stuff. There are 3 dozen drawers in the stack. They are long enough that one of them contains rulers and drafting supplies. Their depth is perfect for organizing spools of thread (cut lengths of cardboard split the drawers into four troughs so that thread stays in nice, colour-coordinated order. Another drawer now has scissors, wax, tailor's chalk, and other sewing accessories. We have one for embroidery floss, one for ink and calligraphy stuff, one for drawing supplies, another for ordinary pens and pencils. Some contain nails and screws and the like, while others contain small boxes of tools. We have only filled just over half of the drawers so far, which is good, because I am certain that further cleaning and organizing will yield more things that need to go into them.
Can I tell you how nice it is to be living with someone who agrees that a fun thing to do on a Friday evening is to clean and organize stuff? It is fun to work together, one cutting cardboard strips, the other inserting them into drawers and arranging the thread in colour order (one drawer for the good threads (cotton, linen, and silk), and one for the bad threads which are still useful for temporary basting stuff together (cotton-covered poly and polyester). We see eye to eye on questions like what things go into the same drawer, and what needs different drawers. Once we'd done filling drawers we had enough room on the shelves to put the fabric on them, and the kitchen table was clean and empty for the first time in weeks, and we were both happy!
I am terribly pleased with the luck we have had in finding free or cheap furniture to help organize our stuff since I moved in. Oddly enough, each time we have acquired a new piece we think that it makes a huge difference to have it, but that the house is now full, and there is no more room for other new furniture, but then we find another, realize that there is, in fact room for it, and there is, and it makes a huge improvement. But this time I think that we really are full and don't have room for anything else...
