Tentatively Tasmanian

Moving anywhere, whether it be to a different house in the same city or across the world, always mean having to buy new stuff.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve crammed most of your belongings into a trailer, a rental van or even a shipping container, some of your stuff either can’t fit, is not allowed (no booze from France to here) or just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

But then you arrive in your new destination and realise that due to having a fridge that’s permanently part of the kitchen cupboards and a vacuum cleaner that was screwed into the wall and specifically included as part of the ‘chattels’ of sale and never needing a clothes dryer and realising that the new house doesn’t have a dishwasher and having to leave behind all cleaning equipment and products in order to satisfy the notaire that the apartment was going to be surgically clean enough for both her and the new owners’ approval….. you have to go shopping.

It is most definitely not shopping for the fun stuff. I mean, who gets excited about looking for a vacuum cleaner?

And I’ve become one of those people. You know the ones. There are thousands of us, but I have never paid actual money to become one. Now, in my fifty fourth year, I have.

I’m a member of Choice. In the afternoons, you’ll find me peering at reviews on hoovers that stand up, the barrel-shaped ones thatget dragged from room to room, those that need to be fixed to the walls, have batteries, are hypoallergenic, tell you what suction speed to use, useful filters, automatic floor surface converters, extendable arms and a armload of click-on brushes, poles, wet polishers and mops.

Yes, it is boring but also fascinating at the same time. Prices of their recommended brands and models vary for $200 to $3,000 which in fact makes the job of selecting the ‘best’ one for us (i.e. what we can afford and how useful it actually is) even more confusing. If we spent three thousand smackers on a vacuum I’d be insuring it as a work of art….

Don’t get me started on dishwashers, televisions or fridges.

Craig* would much rather be looking at kayaks, camper trailers or fishing boats, but we do need to have a house with food that doesn’t spoil, clothes that dry in less than three days and floors that don’t cover the soles of your feet with crumbs like the top of a chocolate freckle.

Do we want our dishwasher to be affordable or effective?
Use a lot of energy or a little but leave food stuck on the glasses?
Butt ugly with loads of cycle options or cute but incredibly noisy?
Able to wash long stemmed wine glasses or remove the mysteriously-sticky avocado from knives?
Australian made (or at least designed because we know they’re all made in China) or a swish, no-nonsense, perennially-reliable European star?

Anyhooo, we were on our Sunday drive to Cremorne and stopped at a Homemaker Centre, the outer-suburban mecca for folk like us.

We didn’t rush in; our pace was reluctant and slow. We unenthusiastically listened to the product features and sales pitches from two separate vacuum cleaner experts and cleaned a bit of their carpets. Yes sir, it does indeed feel like a vacuum, who’d have thought? And do they deliberately leave their floors dirty for customers to see results or is it just shabby shopkeeping?

In another megastore the TVs were all on and blaring for our attention, which made us feel unaccountably tired. Our telly, bought in 2011, is still working but is comically small and it seems like everyone now has a screen larger than their windows. We’re hoping for a happy compromise but Just. Couldn’t. Be. Arsed. Looking.

Dishwashers and dryers seemed even more boring than vacuum cleaners and TVs and for some reason we forgot our mission and shopping list and drifted over to the coffee machines. We have one, but it’s still sailing the seas in a shipping container, with a hopeful arrival date of maybe six weeks. There was a palpable sense of longing and homesickness as we spotted our model, albeit a later version, and stared at it. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give for our Magnifica to be here right now,” Craig sighed as I tentatively stroked the milk steamer nozzle.

Defeated, we left electronica and appliances and looked for some couches. Moving from a compact 84 square-metre apartment to a 187 metre-squared house has meant that our 12 year old IKEA sofa would resemble a brick in the middle of a tennis court.

Boy oh boy, we saw them ALL. We visited the posh places, the not-so-posh-but-kinda-decent places and the CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY stuck-together-with-hope-and-staples places. We’re not L-shaped or modular people and those, along with the frighteningly skinny lunar module legs, covered about 90% of the entire stock available. I don’t want to plonk my ample arse into a chair and hear the metallic ‘twannnnnnggg’ of a leg snapping under duress.

I’m old, but I’m not ‘grandma needs her oxygen tank’ old and some of the sofas on sale were flouncy or puckered or curvy or something that created itself in the 1970s and continued to reproduce for decades afterwards. Craig sat in one and sighed, enjoying the comfort, but I quickly burst his bubble when I hissed, “Look, I know it might feel nice but I DO NOT WANT to feel embarrassed and depressed every time I walk into the lounge room.”

Otherwise, there were the sofas or modular units designed for people who, unless they needed to defecate, clearly intend to spend their entire lives inside the lounge room. Cup holders, massagers, trays for snacks, butt lifting machinery, conversion to bed mode, mini fridges and plug in extras. Heaven help them during a power cut.

Eventually, and with no joy in our eyes whatsoever, we settled on two larger replicas of the tiny IKEA sofa we already have. Black, leather, no patterns, unadorned. “It’s the pillows and the rugs that add the colour,” I assured Craig, who was already out of the door in his eagerness to escape the misery of Sunday shopping.

His eyes were already fixed on the blinking BCF* sign in the distance. I was about to crush his spirit yet again when I said, ‘Nope, we’ll do that later’ and led him back to the counter to pay for our sensible sofas.

The vacuum, TV, dryer and dishwasher will just have to wait until our strength and joy for living returns.

*Craig – just to give him a tiny bit of anonymity unless you ventured here via Facebook
*BCF – Boating Camping Fishing