The Quest for Gorm

We've been 'camping'. Moving from room to room to evade painters, electricians, dust, paint fumes and noise. To no avail. They all keep following us!

It has been a challenge to keep our sanity living amidst renovations. We finally decided to do something about the leaky roof, the flooded rooms and the electricity that goes kaput when it rains.

So for the past 5 weeks the builders have moved in and we are camping out in our own house. It does not help that the builders' sense of project management is so skewed, nor that our budget is modest and our renovations not extensive enough to warrant heavy-duty manpower. So they have been sending us one or two workers a day who putter through what they have to do at a very leisurely pace - which infuriates me of course but there is nothing I can really do. Tried calling to plead for more workers to speed up the pace - nada. Resorted to sarcastic smses - nada. Just got to put up with it.

So right now, we have a hole in the kitchen wall that has not been patched up, a single mattress sits in our living room and has turned into the children's trampoline, we eat 'out' in the living room on a coffee table which is too small for all 7 of us because our dining area has been hijacked by tons of stuff which we have had to move out from the rooms.

ALL our bedrooms have got plastic bags of 'stuff' higgledy-piggledy thrown in for 'sorting'. Laurel and Hardy are parked in one bedroom painting and smoking (I've found cigarette butts in my garden and IN my bathroom!!). The front of my house has been painted, but the side is half painted with sealant and the other half still with my old yellow paint. The porch roof that was done has to be re-done because they cut the rafters and beams too short - the rain now splats into the porch instead of into the drain. Brilliant lot aren't they.

An 'electrician' (and I use this term loosely - he seems to be more your average construction worker than a trained/certified electrician) is wandering around our house dreamily as if in search of a muse - poor chap has no equipment to speak of (he has had to unplug my fridge to use his drill - poor sod did not even have an extension wire! I finally lent him ours when I got tired of seeing my fridge unplugged and re-plugged) and we fear, sketchy electrical knowledge. Yesterday KH came home to find him testing live and dangling wires "for current" and sceptically asked him if he knew what he was doing. The chap waggled his head and said yes. So I'm just crossing my fingers here. And did I mention that the guy cut one wire and now my entire second floor is 'light-less' - all overhead lights no longer work. Sigh. He did that to the TV antenna and killed Kids Central two days ago - the kids howled and our friend had to fix the problem in double-quick time.

Also, we sort of went nuts at Ikea and ended up buying two new sofas. So we threw out the old - it was high time anyway since the fabric had frayed, the stuffing was coming out and one arm had splintered so much that a whole stick of wood was sticking out of it. Too bad. It was might comfy and grungy and was the spot for many an afternoon nap but it was time to go.

Trouble is, the new sofa looked so spanking sleek and new that it (a) sticks out like a sore thumb next to my well-worn cane gem and (b) its so huge that it just dominates the space. So now the living room looks really unco-ordinated and weird.

And speaking of Ikea - we spent five consecutive days at ikea (tampines and alexandra) trawling for stuff. We found most of what we wanted.

But the item that drove us nuts was the Gorm storage shelves. It was quite the head-spinning effort to find the darn shelves.

Useful things I learnt the hard way about Ikea: (1) People working on the showroom floors and people working in the market/warehouse floor DO NOT talk to each other. I wish they would. (2) the Ikea computer system does not know the full inventory/stock list either. Maybe only the head honcho keeps a handwritten list by his bedside updated nightly by elves! No, actually I think elves would have been a lot more efficient. (3) Ikea Tampines and Ikea Alexandra are just pretending to be related - they are actually two different stores totally - and yes, again, they do not talk to each other. I wish they would.

You can gather from this that we went up to the shop floor at Ikea Tampines and were told that Gorm shelves were available. When we went down to the market floor - nup, all were missing. None on the shelves at all.

When we asked the market floor guys, we were told: oh out of stock. Clearly upstairs did not know what downstairs was doing. When was stock coming in? Er, not sure. Okay, so we asked if Alexandra had stock. Uh, dunno - came the reply - our computer systems not linked. Check with Info counter. Right. Info Tampines called Info Alexandra. Alexandra confidently chirped: oh we have more than a thousand pieces in stock! Okay the race was on! Dang the torpedoes!

You know what I mean right? When fate seems determined to foil you and you are equally determined to sock one in its face... KH (by now in one of his I-MUST-GET-THIS moods) drove us (the whole brood plus Lolita) down to Alexandra at the other side of the island. Zoomed into Market Hall and voila! NO stock! Bored salesperson said: check with specialty area.

Wah, I was ready to tear my hair out or tear Ikea's hair out. Went to Specialty area. Asked a sales staff there and she goes: huh? What specialty area?? Not my department, can you try (looking wildly around) that man over there!

I pounced on that unfortunate soul walking past and hissed: Where are your Gorm shelves??

Answer: Er if they're not there, then they're out of stock lah. That's when I had it. I launched into this polite but hissy-sounding lecture about why 1000 missing parts of Gorm were in the Ikea neverland, why couldn't they pay for a better computer system that actually talked to each other and why oh why couldn't someone please just give me some accurate information for a change!

The long and short of it is, after cornering one after another Ikea staff and looking like a volcano about to erupt, one lovely Maggie went behind swing doors and came back with - miracle of miracles! - 9 Gorm shelves that we wanted! Hooray.

KH later said that he was impressed that I pushed on with The Quest for Gorm. He was about to throw in the towel. Yeah right.

You know that if I can go ballistic over 9 sorry Gorm shelves that the reno is really really getting on my nerves.

And yes in case you were wondering, we ARE Friends of Ikea! But honestly after 5 days at Ikea , I don't think I want to see another Swedish meatball anytime soon.