Chaos

I may have mentioned it being like a building site around here. Yesterday I got an educational view from the balcony as the builders poured concrete into the new pathway below. They're quite skilled about it actually. The big machine pours the concrete in, then they spread it out evenly, smooth it over etc. A guy comes a long with a flat broom on a stick with a pointy bit in the middle, with which he cuts grooves to make concrete panels. No measuring, he just makes nice even grooves along the length of the path. Then a guy with a normal broom sweeps the surface to make the textured walkway. Another couple of guys make the edges extra smooth to finish them nicely, then finally a guy sprays the whole thing with some kind of liquid - I guess this is a hardening agent or similar. It dries quickly in the sun.

Here's a gratuitous shot of the giant pouring machine - it's angled as that's the only way I could fit it in:


Anyway, yesterday also brought the arrival of our sea freight. This is where the rest of our house joins us in the apartment. The good news is that it all seems to be present, although we haven't opened all the boxes yet to see if things are intact (but so far, so good). However....

Oh. My. God. How much stuff do we have?!?!?!?!

Remember our nice spacious apartment?


It's turned into this:


We have taken a storage room. Only snag is that it's in the other building. We looked at the ones in our building but they were tiny. Building 2 has much bigger rooms, and we are going to need the space... so all our books, CDs, old kitchen stuff, shed/garden stuff etc are all going to be put away.

We hit on another tiny snaglet as well. We bought a new bed a couple of weeks ago, wanting to use our existing bed for the spare room. So off we trotted to the bed shop, where we ordered a king size bed.

Yesterday we reckoned we'd put our British king size mattress onto said new bed (the new mattress hasn't arrived yet) so we had somewhere to sleep, otherwise Alan would have to build the second bed.

Here we discovered the hithertofore unknown difference in British and American king sizes:



I guess we need to buy new sheets....