Happy Halloween!

We have descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen construction industry, and are only just beginning the long claw out.  Posting shall remain sporadic.  Eat some horseradish and sirachi sauce off of a skull, and pretend you're down here with us.

Happy Halloween!

My day was AWESOME. With Bonus Electricians.

Posting is sporadic at the moment.  For my laxity, I apologize, but renovations, once begun, seem to keep on happening, and one day you wake up to find that your electrician has interpreted “I want this light and this other light both on the same circuit and both controlled by this switch right here” as instructions to pull the wiring for the second light out of the ceiling and paint and plaster the ceiling up behind him.

My day today was awesome.  It went sort of like this:
            "Hi Julio, my redoubtable electrician friend!  Where is everyone?"
            "Hello Señora Tabubilgirl! The floor people came, but then they went away again.  They seemed worried about something.  They said they were going to call you.  Enrique the plumber is off sick. The kitchen installation people haven't come at all, but that's okay, because neither did the ceramicist, and we can't do the kitchen installation till the he puts the last corner tiles put in, so that's a good thing.  But don't you worry, Señora Tabubilgirl!  Right now I'm just finishing up the kitchen outlets, but after that, I will do all the tiles myself!  And O Look - here are the floor people now!"
            The floor people were worried.  About two things things. The first of which they wanted to show me right away.  And that ended up in a phone call to our general contractor, which went like this:
            "Rodrigo! Where are you!"
            "In the car!  Going places!  Buying paint for the painters!"
            "There's just a little problem with the bedroom floors and I'd like to see you here as soon as possible!"
            Rodrigo is a good contractor.  He knows a client in a tail-spin when he hears one.  He was on-site in less than ten minutes flat.

            "Hel-lo, Rodrigo!  How are you this fine morning!  Remember how we went to rather a lot of trouble to level the floors and take out the hollows and downward leaning slopes?"
            "Yes?"
            "Right.  So why exactly, after all that leveling is there now a great big upward hump in the middle of the master bedroom floor?"
            "Ah. That's just where the old slab meets the new slab. The floor guys expected a little variation.  Anything up to half a centimeter.  Where are the floor guys, anyway?"
            "Rodrigo, this ruddy great hump is a lot more than half a centimeter!  See?"
            "Oooooh. Oh. Yeah. My word, that IS a big hump. Eight centimeters?  My word. Well, it's not that wide... I reckon we can knock that out, no worries."
            And Julio was duly hauled out of the kitchen and handed a hammer and a chisel.
            Rodrigo looked at me. "Where are those floor people, Tabubilgirl?"
            "Oh, they went away again.  That was the second thing.  They've lost the floor."

We went into the kitchen for a tour of inspection.  And a spit-take.  Rodrigo bellowed.
            "Julio!"
            Julio appeared, chisel in hand.
            "Would you care to explain" Rodrigo said, blinking rapidly, "what you are doing to those electrical outlets next to the sink?"
            "Well, Señora Tabubilgirl wanted two of them. I just finished screwing the cases on so that the installers can come in, just like you asked me to."
            "But why aren't they level?"
            "But they are level!"  Julio was stung.  "You've both made such a fuss about level - I even used the bubble level to make sure that they are perfectly level with the floor!"
            "They’re not level."
            "They are level!  I measured them myself! 
            Rodrigo gathered himself visibly. And let it all out with a rush. "They're side by side-" he hollered, "two centimeters apart, and one of them is three-quarters of a bloody centimeter higher than the other one!"
            Julio looked at him and looked at him and there was absolutely no compromise in his eyes. I could see Rodrigo looking back, and deciding that there were some battles that were just not worth the winning.  Fixing this would involve taking off a lot of tile, and a lot of grout – and considering how lucky we were to have those outlets in the first place* I was inclined to agree with Rodrigo.  Under the circumstances, however, I wasn't entirely sure that I was comfortable with Julio finishing up the tile work before the kitchen installers came.
            "Oh, that's not a problem."  Rodrigo looked happier that there was something to be happier about.  "I've just heard from the ceramicist and he's promised to come in today to finish it all off." 
            Rodrigo’s phone rang.  "Speak of the devil -  Where are you? Downstairs?  Fan-tastic."  He hung up and looked at me.  "Good thing those kitchen installers haven't come in yet.  Where are those boys?  Aren’t they supposed to be here by now?  Speaking of where things are – or aren’t - how'd they lose the floor?"
            I sighed.  "According to the floor people, the floors were delivered here on Friday.  They even have a signature on the delivery slip. Only we didn't get them, and there's no record with the building manager downstairs, so now they're off trying to figure out who actually took delivery."
            Rodrigo’s rather rapt contemplation was interrupted by the arrival of the ceramicist.
            "Don't mind me."  The man said.  "I'm just here to get my stuff.  I've got my boys waiting downstairs in the truck.  We've got another job."
            Rodrigo inhaled alarmingly, and I fled back toward the bedroom and Julio and his chiseling. When I came out again, the ceramicist was looking tightly unhappy, and lowering a tile into a puddle of cement with a rather... teenage look on his face. 
            He did not, however, stick around.  The most we got out of him was the rest of the tiles cut to size. 
            "I will stick them in myself" Rodrigo said, sniffing in a faintly teenager-ish fashion himself. "The tiles can be wiped clean easy enough, and the grout tidied up after the cabinets go in - if we can get the cabinets installed…”
            "I'm calling the kitchen people now."  I assured him, and Rodrigo went off to greet the painters, who were arriving in a cheerful mob, and Gods bless them, settling down to do some actual painting.
            I called our contact at the kitchen store.
            "Oh, hello" She said vaguely. 
            "We were expecting the installers this morning..."
            "Oh.  Right.  You mean they're not there?"
            "Nope."
            "Huh. So do you want them tomorrow then?"


* First we showed Julio the detail design specs and he agreed that they were good.  Then I took a sharpie marker and drew little boxes on the wall where each outlet would go, and he agreed that that was a sensible precaution. Then I wrote “enchufe” (outlet) with my sharpie right next to each of the boxes – and he went and plastered the wall smooth over the top of all of it and had the ceramicist start laying tiles right there.  While he went and rewired the switch for the ceiling lights to run the dishwasher.  I'm not joking.

White or White or White?

The problem with the tiles is, the ceramicists doing the tiles just won't...come.
            When they are here, they do fantastic work, but in the last week they came once to lay 6 floor tiles, and went away again. The came back once more, for a half-day, in which they tiled half of the darned kitchen, but they've refused to come back ever since.
            It's a protest, you see. They refuse to come, then the general contractor calls them up and gives them an ear-bashing, and they are just SO hurt that they have to protest the mistreatment - by not coming.
            This is sort of awesome, really. Only our general contractor is starting to look sort of strained and undernourished....

Today was all about colors.  My mother-in-law and I went off to the paint store to pick out a few nice warm whites for the walls and ceilings and doors.  I had harbored naïve imaginings of a helpful assistant who would study the floor samples we’d brought with us and then spend a pleasant half-hour walking us through pleasing color combinations.  What we GOT was a double arm load of swatch books and the suggestion that we go outside into the parking lot where the light was more natural, because the fluorescents inside the store weren't doing the swatches any favors.
            I like white.  I like walls that are pale and bright and throw back all the light you throw at them.  I just hadn’t realized how many whites there are.  In a house-painter’s imagination, ‘white’ seems to cover everything from a mangy sort of orange-grey all the way to salmon pink and olive.  And the truer whites tend toward the harsh blue-based glare of a porcelain lavatory bowl.  We spent an hour and a half crouched on the tarmac in a corner of the parking lot, paging through what felt like half a thousand spiral-bound swatch sheets, looking for something warm-ish and bright-ish, and more-or less genuinely white-ish, with neither too much butter-cream or duck-egg, and when we’d found a few that looked, on paper, like they might suit, something a shade or two darker, to tone, and paint the doors and skirting boards.
            Without a native guide, there were more choices than a sensible person could assimilate in a month of painted Sundays. The suggested color gradients on the swatch sheets didn’t help – they went right from porcelain-pan to deep-brown biscuit-colored in one hop. 
            We came away with a car-trunk full of sample bottles of whites and almost-whites and delicate shades of cream, and we shall paint them all over the living room wall and see if there is any infinitesimal difference between any of them.

Construction Happens, and Happens Some More

After all the wishing and planning and designing and ordering and purchasing was complete, the contractor and his maestros (workmen) moved in and things started happening rather precipitously.  In the past three weeks, we have had:  

1) The demolition of pretty much the whole apartment down to the concrete structural walls.  Floors, ceilings, doors, lintels, non structural walls - you name it, we dug it out.
2) Lots and lots of jackhammers. Tiles don't give up easily.
3) One very seasick apprentice who'd been manning a jackhammer in a small concrete space for two and a half days straight.
4) Electricians.  Everywhere. 
5) Ditto plumbers.
6) The original in-floor heating layer was poured funny, and there’s a seven cm slope differential in the living room floor that needs fixing.  Uh oh.
7) Concrete dust, everywhere.
8) Does anyone else smell that smell? 
9) An unexpected trip to the ER with probable ripped tendons all over my foot, and a very unexpected diagnosis of plantar fascitis.
10) Crutches.
11) Physiotherapy.
12) More Plumbers.
13) That smell can't possibly be real, right?
14) It's coming from the bedroom end of the flat?  Oh God, now we have to take up the bedroom floors, too.  You mean all of them?!?!
15) Rush shopping for new bedroom floors - on crutches.  And there's an eight centimeter differential that needs fixing in the master bedroom as well? How jolly.
16) More concrete dust.  Everywhere else.
17) Ceramicists laying tiles.
18) A seriously unhappy resident who calls the police because the ceramicists decided to use the spare key to come in on the weekend and make Very Loud Bashing Noises waaaaay outside of allowable-noise-hours, and going in person to yell at the ceramicists apparently didn't work.
19) Damage control. Much abasing. With chocolates.
20) Food poisoning. All Saturday night and all Sunday.  Did you know you can move really fast on crutches?
21) Ceramicists who, sulking about being bawled out by their general contractor, turn off their phones and refuse to come in to work on Monday. Tuesday they aren’t feeling quite up to par, so they don’t come in that day either. Burp.

Today the electrician is wiring up the bedrooms, and the ceramicists are back on the job, moving steadily through the kitchen and down the hallway. They do lovely work, but the noise really is incredible. I think the neighbor showed considerable restraint. If I'd heard them doing that above my head at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, I'd have skipped the local cops and called in a S.W.A.T. team. With helicopters.

Apartment Hunting in Santiago de Chile

When we arrived here two years ago, we were told that the comuna of Providencia has two sorts of apartments: we could have a brand new apartment with all mod cons, but it would be the size of a shoebox, and the mod-con kitchen would fit in a closet. Or we could have a larger apartment, but it would be older, and it would be falling apart.  “Literally” our rental agent had told us, her eyes wide.             
            “The larger apartments are in the older buildings and the owners don’t want to do anything and the walls are all falling down.”
            We had no interest in shoe-boxes with kitchens in closet, two years ago or this time around.  So, with no faith in named addresses, subtracting fifty-percent from listed square footages, and assuming that if an agent was talking, there was fibbing going on, I went out in my highest heels to find us a fixer-upper flat.  Something older, a place that needed a little love.  It’s liberating, looking at fixer-uppers to buy, instead of to rent.  You look less sardonically, and more judiciously.  You don’t need to concern yourself with the surfaces of things – past the cracking and peeling and molding and slumping, all the way down to the bones. 

Our ‘new’ place has lovely bones. Everything else, on the other hand - the building we’ve bought into is about twenty years old and all of the former owners have been… let’s be diplomatic and say that they were uninterested in the art of constructive maintenance, and leave it at that.
            When we took possession, there wasn’t a window in plumb or a functioning hinge in the place.  The floating floor listed and boomed alarmingly, the bedroom carpets appeared to have been the last resting place for twenty years worth of incontinent cats, and the cabinetry in the kitchen was in such an advanced state of mildew that they could be pulled apart with bare hands –
            But the bones are lovely. We’ve stripped the place right down to them, and now we are neck-deep in the agonizing, exhilarating process of building her back up. 

How I Lost My Innocence

Posting on Tabubilgirl has been somewhat sporadic for the last few months. There's a reason for that. Mr Tabubil and I have bought ourselves a flat - or an apartment, in North-American speak. 
           The flat that we've been renting for the last two years is a wonderful flat.  We love it and we would have lived here forever and ever - were it not for one leeetle issue: 
            The street that runs outside our window is loud. Deceptively pretty, verged with green grass and ancient trees, our narrow little street runs almost all the way from one end of the city to the other. These two lanes are a major cross-town artery, and heavy traffic runs along it from dawn 'til Christmas. Rush hour lasts till ten at night, with all the honking and squealing that go with mile-long traffic jams, and when happily sozzled people, driving with dashing enthusiasm and panache, come back to Santiago from the discotheques in Vina del Mar (a city two hours away on the coast) we have two extra rush-hours at four-thirty every Saturday and Sunday morning. Complete with air-horns.
Sometimes the nicest flat in the world just isn't stay-able.   
            Hunting for a flat to buy is a very different process to hunting for a flat to rent.  The stakes are higher, and the real estate agents are correspondingly more predatory.
            "They'll try anything," my Dad told me. "They'll take you to see places that have nothing to do with what you asked for. They'll guilt-trip you when you tell 'em so - look at you with sorrowful, puppy-dog faces as they explain how they're doing exactly what you asked - only more so, because what they've got right there is better. Don't be buffaloed.  A seasoned estate agent would eat raw puppy dogs for breakfast if it'd help them land a sale. And smile, and offer compliments to the chef."*

After our recent experiences with real estate agents in Australia I wasn't exactly inclined to come down on the side of the real-estate agents, but some of Dad's rhetoric was coming across a wee bit personal - eve bitter. And the very same day that he called me up to talk, a flat showed up on Chile's real-estate website, Portal Inmobilario, that hit every single one of the points on our want-list: it was in the right suburb, situated on the quietest corner of the quietest of streets, and it had a price smack-bang in the middle of our ballpark. There were even photos to go with the listing - not photographs of the insides of bathroom cabinets, or flash-lit corners where ceilings met walls (the people who sell flats on Portal Inmobilario have highly eccentric ideas about what other people want to see) but twenty-six photographs of actual rooms. And the rooms were beautiful. 
            I called the agent on the listing and made an appointment for that afternoon.  Maybe I had just  circumvented the whole puppy-eating circus and found the place on my very first go. I was so optimistic that I invited my mother-in-law to come with me. Just in case it was so much too good to be true that I needed a strong mind to provide a balancing opinion. The price was low, for what we'd be getting. Perhaps there were problems with the drains? We could deal with drains - a week or two with a good plumber and Bob's your proverbial, right? The place was a gem - there were photos to prove it!   

When we arrived at the address on the listing, we found the agent waiting for us outside a smart, freshly painted little block of flats.  There was even a tightly manicured garden of flowers out front.  It was lovely. 
            The agent smiled warmly and held out a hand. "Charmed"  he said, and turning his back on us, he walked briskly away up the street.  "If you'll follow me -" he called over his shoulder, "we don't want to be late."
            Running after him, I caught his arm and very politely (I like to think) asked him what the heck he thought he was playing at.
            "Oh!" He said. His eyes were very wide and very surprised. "You thought that this was-?  Oh no. Oh dear me, no. We don't give out the real addresses of the places we're selling." 
            He explained to me that in Chile, real-estate agents have to give out inaccurate addresses so that apartment owners aren't bothered day and night by people who've seen the apartment on the Portal and aren't really serious about things. It's the caring thing to do. 
            Four blocks of fast-paced rationalizations later, we came to a stop on the corner of one of the most chaotically noisy intersections in our half of Santiago. There is an apartment building there. It is a building that Mr Tabubil and I walk past almost every day. And when we do, we look up that that building and shake our heads and say "Spare me from ever having to live next to this sort of chaos. Ever." And we shake hands and affirm that we won't.
            So I looked the agent firmly in both eyes and said "No."
            The agent put on a puppy-dog face that would have won a muddy Labrador Retriever a reprieve from a year's worth of bath-times.
            "And I came all this way…" He sighed a sigh. "What in the world are you looking for?"
            Raising my voice to be heard while a fire-engine donged past and six taxis took him on with screaming car horns, I told him what I was looking for-  the whole Tabubil spec: square footage, price-range, wants and not-wants -
            The agent's doleful face cleared like a wet Sunday afternoon before an unexpected ray of sunshine.
            "I understand."  He cried. "I understand. Absolutely! You're so incredibly right. Do you hear the noise?" He swept his hand through the air, taking in the whole honking, heaving intersection. "What you want is quiet! I've got another flat - it's exactly the size you're looking for, just a few streets away. Would you like to see..?"
            And, because the address he gave was on a street we knew - and because it was a quiet street, we said yes. We were practically right there anyway.  

When we got there, the street was empty, as advertised, the building was pretty, and according to the agent, the flat in question was at the back, facing out onto a garden. While he rhapsodized, we were joined by his wife. She had armfuls of forms, and it turned out that to even enter the building I had to fill out those forms in triplicate, hand over my RUT (national ID number), and make written promises of exclusivity and follow-up.
            And yet, we still went inside. After all, we were already there. The flat the agent had praised to the skies was barely a quarter of the square footage he'd promised me - and only if you included the building's emergency stairwell - all six flights of it- and the little cupboard in the elevator lobby where you threw out the trash. The kitchen was a swing-door closet fitted out with a single gas burner and a sink the size of a postage stamp, the "matrimonial bedroom" might have fitted a single mattress if you squeezed and didn’t care to close the door, the 'garden' was a rubbish-filled parking lot, and the rest of it, well - my mother-in-law took one look at the beaming agents and leaned toward me and said, out of the corner of her mouth, "Do I ever wish you spoke Dutch right now" and came down with an acute case of the coughs.
            We couldn't get out of there fast enough. 
            Literally. The agent and his wife had blocked the door.
            "Perhaps" they said, fixing me with two pairs of beady eyes, "your expectations are too high. This place is every thing you asked for. Were you imagining a palace?"
            "I was imagining something that half-way approximated what I said I wanted." 
            Standing with his hands gripping both sides of the door, the agent shook his head. I was the most optimistically optimistic gringo who ever tried to buy a property in Santiago. Did I even know how lucky I was? Why - these two flats I was seeing today were the only two flats in my price range in this half of the city. Double what I was quoting was the bare minimum for a place smaller than this. Why - they were dealing with apartments at triple my price fifteen times a day! 
            Considering that his own agency listing on Portal Imobilario had had no less than sixteen properties in or below our price range, I admired his poker face.  Behind me, my mother-in-law's coughing fit had given up all pretense and turned into full-blown giggles.  Ducking under the agent's arm, I slipped neatly through the door into neutral territory.   My mother-in-law followed me, shooting the agent a rather-too-decipherable look and laughing all the way.
            Back down on the street, we found ourselves back in puppy-dog- territory again. The agent and his wife trailed us all the way to the end of the block, thrusting out handfuls of papers and promising that we'd regret not taking the specs of the best place we'd ever see in a year of looking.       
            We didn’t turn back. Blessed are they, it is said, who have not seen, and yet have believed. Blesseder still, I reckon, are those who come to belief sufficiently far in advance that they might go apartment-hunting in very pointy heels - the better for bringing down on the insteps of insufferable real estate agents! 

*I appreciate that this is painting real-estate-agents with a very broad brush. If anyone chooses to feel offended, go sell your real estate with hearts and flowers and bunny-rabbits laid on, and come back to me with testimonials. We'll talk.

The Pleasures of Renting Part II

In the previous installment, an insulation expert was declaiming in horror over the built state of our house.

            It's taken some serious time, but the owners have finally acknowledged the general decrepitude of their two-year-old rental property, and all of a sudden (now that summer is over and we are no longer screaming for window screens and roof insulation on a bi-weekly basis) they are absolutely horrified, and have been galvanizing the original contractors to action right, left and center.   

            The front door frame is slumping sideways and skirting boards are popping loose from the walls all over the house and there's a hollow spot in the concrete pad under the living room floor and wardrobe frames are peeling off the bedroom walls and splitting apart the drywall (that was last Tuesday) - and as none of it is relevant to the comfort of the tenants, something must be done!

A man from the building firm came up last Thursday.  To my profound regret, I was in Adelaide during his visitation and had to deputize his supervision to the rental agent.

            I called her Thursday afternoon for a recap.

            "Oh it's fine."  She said breezily.  "Everything's fixed."

            "Ehnh?"

            "Oh yeah.  The front door just didn't have enough nails in it, that's all, and the skirting boards -  that's all just cosmetic. The builders hadn't used strong enough glue.  He back-filled the cavities with silicone and now it looks fine."

            "But some of those skirting boards were standing out almost half an inch!  That's not cosmetic - that's shifting.  Subsistence.  Something wrong with the foundations!"

            "Yeah, okay, fine."  She heaved a sigh.  " Basically, what's happened is that when they put in the foundations, they didn't drain the ground around them properly and now they're drying out and making the house move.  After I talk to you I have to talk to the owners about putting in a drip-feed system all around the outside of the house to keep the concrete at a constant humidity.  They really need to get on to that."

            I would give money to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.  And for the subsequent high-volume arguement that our landlord is going to be having with the construction firm's regional representative. What goes around comes around. 

The Pleasures of Renting

There was a knock on the door.
            "I've been told to come and look at your insulation." The man said. "What's wrong with it?"
            "We don't have any." I said. 
            He looked at me and blinked. "Yeah. Right. What's wrong with it?"
            "We don't have any." I said again.  "That's the problem."
            The inspector actually took a step backward. "What?" He said, shocked. "No insulation in your roof? None at all?"
            "None at all."
            "But it's 37 degrees outside!"
            "Yep."
            "And you've got a black tile roof!"
            "Yep."
            He looked at me in horror. "Why the hell did you do that for, then?"
            "We didn't." I said. "We're renting. After we moved in, let's say that certain... deficiencies in the building have become rather apparent. The insulation's written into the lease. The owners just won't install it."
            "You can't possibly have nothing up there." He said furiously. "Where's your access?"
            I pointed down the hall to the access hatch above the study door. "We don't have a ladder, but I can offer you a chair, if you like."
            He snorted and, grabbing the edges of the hole, chinned himself up for a look around.  His legs waggled furiously.
            "There really is nothing up there!" He said, chinning himself back down. He shook his head and whistled. "And look at that that." He said. "The front door frame's sloping sideways. How old is this place?"
            "About a year." I said, grinning.
He staggered again. " Who's your landlord? Who built this place? How the hell did the council even pass it?"

I was, in a quiet way, thoroughly enjoying myself. After we moved in and discovered just how badly our house had been built, the hot-weather contingency clauses we'd insisted in adding to our lease became rather important - or would have been, if our landlords had shown any intention of honoring the contract. We've been trying to have the insulation put in for six months now. And to have the flyscreens put in the windows - something more than critical here in the blowfly belt, at least if you plan on enjoying through-ventilation. The landlord's latest desperate avoidance tactic has been to go on holidays in Thailand, where they can't hear our bi-weekly pleas and imprecations. A tactic which makes his claims of being budget-strapped less than convincing.  The only reason we're even having an inspector come round is that the real-estate agent took advantage of the landlord being away and ordered it herself.
            The inspector looked around thoughtfully. "Where's your air-conditioning?"
            "Over there." I pointed.
He stomped over to the wall and squinted at the unit. "Half a kilowatt? Bloody hell! You're trying to cool a whole house with that?"
            "Oh, not all of it." I said. "Just all of it except the living room.  The living room's got a 2 kilowatt unit in the corner. It just doesn't reach any further than the living room door. The one you're looking at? We can't measure any effect farther than 8 feet away. We're sort of camping out in there under the big unit, mostly.  You see the mattress leaning against the wall there?"
He shook his head.
            "I need to come back with a ladder and have a proper look at this." He muttered and stomped back down the hall toward the sloping front door. "And I'm calling the council to find out who built this place. I'll be back."

Yapping and Yowing All the Way Home

Our plans for our move were to hire a professional for the furniture and move the rest ourselves down the street to our new house: six doors away at the other end of our street.  Part of the same development as the house we are leaving, this house is brand new, so new that the owners have been busy there all this week, setting paving in the backyard and installing air-conditioning units in the living room.

The Big Move was scheduled for today, but yesterday our plans changed.
On Wednesday, a company representative for our town's one moving company came to give us a quote - and refused to offer us any insurance on the move.
            "Well, Absolutely Not."  She said, with almost creditable astonishment.  "Why would you even want it?!"
I explained - with visual aids.  (exhibit A - our dining room table. Thank You, O Moving Man with arms like hams and the hand-eye coordination of a concussed turtle.)
            "Really?" She said, wide-eyed and wondering.  "You've really seen personal effects being DAMAGED during a move?"
And she filled me with a bathtub's worth of utter nonsense about magical furniture movers who never in the whole of the company's history suffered one drop or spill or scratch, and then she about faced and beat it the hell out of there, promising over her shoulder to telephone with a quote later in the afternoon.
My sister let our her breath in a puff.  
            "WOW."  She said.
The woman never phoned back.  Yesterday, Mr Tabubil telephoned her, and she airily told him that she'd dropped the quote in our mailbox sometime during the night.We dug it out - and ther quote is twice the amount it should be for what they would be doing.
We found the whole situation rather… disquieting, and Mr Tabubil called U-Haul and rented a van instead, for Saturday.  And his friends at the office have all promised us their help until it is done.

This morning, Mr Tabubil called to set up our internet at the new place, and learned that as far as the telecomunications industry is concerned, our new house does not exist.  We're a bit worried about that.

Later in the morning I went over to the new house to see if all was in order and to see if the telephone had been connected.  Two horrible little dogs live next door - one aging chihuahua bitch and one deeply neurotic fluffy white football.  They escorted me to the front door with a sharp fusillade of yapping and yowing.  Not entirely unreasonable, I suppose.  They have no reason to know that there are new people living square in the middle of THEIR territory.

We don't have a phone line yet.  Bathroom and kitchen all okay.  The sliding glass doors to the back and side yards are so badly installed that with the doors closed and latched, the hanging venetian blinds swing back and forth in a stiff draft.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

When I left the house, the horrible little dogs trotted up the driveway and barked their little throats hoarse - from slightly less than a meter away from my shoes. Rotten manners, both of them.  They followed me halfway home, right at my heels, yapping and yowing and sniffing at my sandals whenever they stopped to take a breath.  The little horrors had better adjust to the new state of affairs fast, or they might find themselves being drop-kicked down the street.

The Plumber Cometh

The hot water tap in our laundry started leaking last night. This morning I called the real estate agent, who called a plumber, who came around to fix it.  Eventually.

Heavy knock on the door.
            I answered, and found a grizzled man propping himself up against the wall with both arms.
He looked at me out of eyes like caves and wheezed.  
            "You call a plumber?"
            Tripping over the front step, he stopped to carefully close the door behind him, then wobbled down the hallway - one foot carefully in front of the other and still going sideways.
            We entered the laundry -
            "Ah ha." He nodded sagely.  "You've got a leak. I'm going to turn the water off at the main.  Where's your main?"
            "Out front, next to the driveway."
            He spun on his axis, wobbled back out the front door, and tripped over the front step.
            I picked up my phone to call Mr Tabubil. 
            "The plumber is here and he is plastered," I giggled. "Just thought you should know, you know, just in case-"
            I was interrupted by a bellow from outside. 
            "I can't find your water main!  Where do you keep it?"
            I went outside and joined him on the driveway.
            "Isn't this it?" I pointed to the stopcock under his foot.
            "Oh,"  He said. "I was looking at that one" and pointed upwind at the neighbor's water main, six meters away, on the other side of their house.

Shutting off our water he swayed and almost fell, then he wobbled back to the house like a drunken gyroscope and tripped over the front step again. He walked the straight-line DUI walk down the hallway (tacking off the walls) to the laundry and pulled himself together enough to deal with the taps, keeping up a running commentary:
            "Stupid cheap crap in these houses. Crappy cheap houses. Look at this - how old is this place?  Not even a year old. The neoprene washers are ripped to bits.  You know what I'm going to do?  I'm going to put in a real washer, like the ones I use up at the hospital.  How about that?  I worked on some of these houses - I worked on one put together so badly that the roof sheets went up and down in the wind like surf on a beach.  They brought up people from Adelaide to work on these houses - you know why they came?  Because nobody would employ them down there. Cowboys. You said this house was about a year old?  Yeah?  Well, that shouldn't be happening."  He pointed to the windowsill, which is splitting along the seams.  "You'll have to watch the other hot taps in the house.  They'll all go on you.  Catch me paying top dollar for a house like this.  I hope you're renting.  Lets turn the water back on."
            This time he found the main all on his own, but he tripped over the front step going out and coming back.
He turned the tap on and gaped. "Is that all the water pressure you got?"  He said, looking at me owlishly.  "You want more?"
            The low-flow water restrictor in our laundry spigot is 100% water efficient; it is so slow that if Penelope of Ithaca had lived in our house, she'd have chosen ye old "washing her hair" dodge instead of spending twenty years weaving her shroud, and she'd have seen off that entire unwelcome mob of suitors before she'd managed to work up a single sud.
            Mr Tabubil, however, being hale, hearty and safe at home in Ithaca, I drew myself up and asked "Are you implying, Sir, that in the desert, in this time of deep concern for our national water resources, I would even for a moment consider appropriating more than my fair share of the common water trust?"
            And I will stand by that statement if and where necessary.
            The plumber blinked turned carefully around, tacked carefully back down the hallway - and tripped over the front step.  Whereupon he looked at me, wheezed, and got back in his truck.
            I didn't dare stay to watch him pull out.

The Alternative

Our new home in Whyalla might have been a construction disaster, but it could have been so much worse.  The new houses haven't caught up with the ancient rent-a-wrecks just yet.  Our friend J arrived in town during the worst of the rental crisis, and found herself a two-bedroom bungalow at the east end of town.  So, okay, ants were parading in through wide cracks in the walls and the bathroom was thirty-years overdue for a good scrub-up (or a bonfire, choose your poison) but it had all the necessary bits, yeah?
            Mostly.  Her front door didn't have a lock, so her first night in the place she locked herself into her bedroom, just in case. In the morning, she climbed out of bed, walked over to the door, turned the door lock - and the door handle fell off in her hand. She was locked in.  Her cell phone was on the other side of the door, and she was reluctant to holler out to her neighbors at six-thirty in the morning.
"Were you worried?" I asked her.
J shrugged.  "I was a little bit worried at first, but I looked around my room and noticed that the window had fallen out.  So I climbed out that way and walked around to the front door in my pajamas."

Spiders Redux

The exterminator was only a stopgap measure. We quickly learned that any spider intrepid enough to make it past the film of diatomaceous earth on the outside walls would be welcomed by our house with cries of "Doors are open, Darlings! Last one inside's a Daddy-Long-Legs!"
            Example: Last night we took out the rubbish and met a very large Redback with a very large egg sac in a very new web strung right across the laundry door.  We watched it scuttle into a wide crack between the door frame and the brick wall that should have been filled with grouting - but wasn't.  
             The construction of this house is not exactly quite up to reasonable par - or building code. Big city developers are buying up old housing trust homes, knocking them down and putting up rows of cookie-cutter ranch houses on sub-divided lots the size of domestic postage stamps.  They're doing it fast and cheap and lousy.  Our house is only eighteen months old, but our walls are full of cracks, our corners are no longer quite square, and the grout and window seals never seem to have happened at all.  Door are hung off plumb and let the desert in as creeping dunes of red sand. The insulation in the roof is made out of crumpled cotton wool and sea-mist, and when you open the windows, they fall right out of the frames and into your arms.
            It's really something. Last week our friend the Architect and his fiancée Zoe drove up from Adelaide to spend a weekend with us in Whyalla.  Bouncing out of the car, the Architect hugged me absently and bellowed "Bloody Hell!  It's like someone hit copy+paste all the way along your street!"
            We gave them the grand tour. We pointed out the hole in the soffit over the front door- where a builder had tried stuffing paint-stirring sticks into the gap and forgotten about them half-way through the job.  We let them open windows and giggled politely when their arms suddenly became unexpectedly full of window panes.  We pointed out our budget sized portico, with the Grand Column twenty seven inches from the front door and the Unitex Dado Rail stapled to the wall.              
            We even showed them the big banana - the party trick. Our garage has three doors - a door from the kitchen and a roller door on both ends: one to the street and one to the back yard, so that the garage can double as a shed and an entertainment space on wet or hot days. It is all very functional and sensibly planned out - except for one teeny tiny design flaw: the kitchen door is placed exactly underneath the backyard-side roller door, and when that roller door rolls up, the roll extends twelve inches out over the door to the kitchen and barricades it shut.  An easy mistake to make and a deadly one never to fix - twelve inches of lazy CAD design by some remote office boffin brainlessly dropping CAD blocks into model space, and a builder that didn't care enough to make it right.
            And once the Architect had done guffawing, we showed him the twelve inches of eave overhanging the north façade. All of the other stuff is small stuff.  Amusing sound bites to show off  to guests.   We laugh at it and it gives the house the personality that shiny new houses that are built right take years to earn.
            What is genuinely infuriating is the house's terrible environmental design.  In the middle of the desert, in a climate of climbing energy costs, rising energy pollution and massive private and public focus on sustainable building design, our roof is black, our north façade is pure window with no overhang and the windows and doors, far from being sealed and double-glazed, are quadruple-vented and drafted and gusted at every seam.            
            Our house is fairly representative of the contemporary mass-produced domestic design and building technology in this town.  It seems about as cynically inefficient as it is possible to contemplate.  Under that black roof, our cream-puff and vapor insulation is more or less useless.  One of our wedding presents was an indoor-outdoor weather station.  Careful observation has established that at 25 degrees centigrade, the internal and external temperatures equalize.  They rise steadily together until the outside temperature reaches 32 degrees C, at which point the inside temperature begins to rise faster than the outside temperature and the house turns into a Turkish bath.   In high summer, with the air conditioners going full-bore, we have struggle to keep the inside temperature under 30 degrees C.
            We spend most of the summer subsisting on popsicles and ice-cream sticks and cucumber salads.
            On the flip side, this house is a fantastic case study in the value of really good environmental design.  I am writing this in our study - the eave-less, window-lined ex-main bedroom on the North side of the house. We are having a cool week and the main part of the house is pleasantly chill.  But it is a lovely sunny morning and in the two hours since the sun came out the study has become so hot that I am sweating rivers in a tank top and boxer shorts, while the spins fast enough to raise whirlwinds.  I am about to move out and go set up my computer on the dining table, where bare arms raise goose bumps and I can shunt the bulk of my personal energy budget from gasping and sweating to thinking.


*Mr Tabubil won our private side bet. 
            I said Not even the Architect.  
            He said You wait and See.
            And Sure Enough, as the Architect entered the city limits, he made a phone call.
            "What is your address, by the way?  I've just realized it never occurred to me to actually ask you where you live.  Reckon I should have thought of that a few hundred kilometers ago, eh?"
            And two minutes after that, we received another call mentioning apologetically that he hadn't brought a street map, so could we possibly offer a few directions? 
            This was complicated.  Our town doesn't have street signs (there are a few, painted on the kerb in letters two inches high, but they're hard to see in daylight and completely invisible after dark) so they drove around town aimlessly until they found a hotel with a name visible on the front and we talked them in.
            I paid up.  

The Background Check

Mr Tabubil and I live in a moderately small town in the semi-to-mostly arid outback - red earth and mallee scrub and sunset-painted rocks.
            A friend visited from the Netherlands not long after we moved here. She drove up from the city by night, and in the morning, first thing, she asked to be taken to the outback - the real, red-toned Australian Outback, please, in technicolor and surround sound, with fair to moderate chances of kangaroo. We drove her 3 kilometers out of town and turned off the car engine and sat still, listening to the wind move through the silence.
            On cloudless nights Mr Tabubil and I drive until the lights of town have faded into the black and park the car beside the road and sit, tilted upward to watch the sky for hours.
You could read by the light of the milky way.
            "We must bring a camera" we say. "Next time. A camera and a tripod and we'll do some long exposures ."
            "Mmmm hmmm" we agree, noncommittally, because a camera isn't right for out here, in some fundamental way that we don't want, quite, to analyze.
             Would we want to remember it distilled and diminished? The stars reduced to flat points of white, without the wind and the night sounds and the sound of us breathing next to each other, cold under the desert sky.

The town of Whyalla sits on a plain flat as a dried up lake bottom in Nevada, but without any mountains to break up the scenery.  There is so much horizon that your eyes start to water from the monotony and latch down on scrub and low bushes to appreciate the texture and the altitude. 
            Driving in to town, you pass through an industrial-ish warehouse-y area, that ebbs slowly into a residential neighborhood, with empty lots and scrubbly fields between every building. It is all spread out - like a wild western cattle town where the lots are marked out by a surveyor full of idealism in a city ten years ago and three thousand miles away, and once the surveyors strings are on the ground, the land gets filled up slowly, piecemeal, according to how everyone is wanting a corner block and there being enough corner blocks to accommodate everybody who wants one.
            Our town started in the early years of the century as a fishing port, and down by the water the oldest quarter of the town is made up of solid old houses, all pressed companionably close against each other and hemmed in by tall trees. There are a few low hills with views of the water, and a "botanical garden" that is hearts-ease - the only really deep green and shadowy place in town.
As the town grew up it spilled out onto the empty plain - all the streets are enormous, with double or triple lanes and huge median strips and small subordinate feeder streets separated from the big bad road by more median strips so that homeowners can pull out of their driveways without being smeared by all the theoretical traffic.
            It is all very theoretical. My first week here, my primary emotional response was existential confusion. Walking the streets was eerie - there were no cars. Six lanes of macadam, broad white concrete sidewalks - and me. No pedestrians and no cars - the mind starts thinking things it rationally oughtn't. Where was everybody? Just past my own mailbox, had I stumbled into a twilight zone?
Then in the far distance, I would see a stream of silver reflections and hear the growl of car engines. There was an intersection up ahead, and the cross-street, identical in every particular to mine, was full of moving vehicles.
            The relief would be intense. No temporal shuffling, no post-apocalyptic mad-maxims, just the realization - in any other town, the road I'd been walking would be a one and a half lane suburban back street.
            This town has eleven municipally maintained football fields - and three football teams. I like the optimism.

When we moved here, we had hoped to find a house in the closer, greener end of town, but the real estate situation here is…idiosyncratic.
            For a long time, the rental market was heaven for a realtor and a headache for renters. The local industries were booming, there was a distinct lack of new building development and it followed that an enterprising agency could put the most appalling dumps onto the market and expect to see two dozen prospective tenants lined up around the block - viciously competing to sign an application for a derelict wreck at rates that would make a stockbroker in downtown Sydney blush.
            There was no incentive to renovate - or even provide basic maintenance, because anything could be shifted - and the occupants would bow in gratitude for the cracked walls and obsolete plumbing.
            Two, three years ago, at the peak of the boom, clouds of buzzing developers descended, buying and razing streets of houses in the newer neighborhoods and building modern suburban palaces - detached townhouses with all mod-cons. Just before the first wave of new houses were completed - the recession hit with a bump. Half the tenants in the area were laid off work and moved on to other places, and the developers and landlords were left quivering in stunned denial.
            We began house hunting before the dust had cleared. We went out on inspections with agents and for the rent they were asking, I would have damn well expected there not to be gross structural damage, doors ripped from their hinges, leaky bathroom pipes flooding the floor - the floor of the living room, and kitchens that hadn't been updated since 1938, when sinks were apparently optional.
All in the same house.
            We found a home in the newer part of town, a house in a new development of ranch houses cut carefully, lot by lot, into an existing neighborhood. It is a friendly state of affairs. Out on the edges of town there are great tracts of nothing - planted spindly-like with light posts and paved with tight bitumen roads with neat concrete verges and, spread oout across hectares of empty red sand, solitary ranch houses, penned tightly by six foot iron fences that pull tight about the eaves.
            No trees, no grass, no scrub, no weeds, no birds, no lizards, no snails - just small iron islands on seas of bulldozed sand. It's crazy out there - paranoid schizophrenic, the houses locked up tight against their neighbors and the vast waving desert that is just on the other side of the wall.
            We have neighbors with front gardens. And a playing field up one road and a park down the other.
            We have air-conditioning. And a modern kitchen with a sink larger than three inches deep and ten inches across. And a fabulously conceived interior color scheme, restful and soothing to the eye, that hides all of the red dust that filters through the window seals and blows under the doors.