March
2006
Nestin’around
We bought new kitchen furniture. One of my nurses casually mentioned that her cousins were moving to France for good and were selling all their furniture and I suddenly became interested. She told me they still had a bedroom and a kitchen set available and at the word “kitchen” a few switches went “on” in my head.
You see, we live in a 4-roomed appartment in the middle of a medium sized city. With our salaries we wouldn’t have been able to afford it without a huge mortgage and selling our first born (come to think of it maybe the second, too). Fortunately my parents bought a house not long before I graduated and told their freshly engaged daughter “The two of you should move here from Timisoara if you marry. We’ll give you the appartment!” We lived at that time in a 2-roomed ratcage so this was heavenly music to our ears. We had the wedding, sold the ratcage and moved. Turns out they ..erm.. forgot to mention my sister will be living with us too. “Only temporarily”they said.
Now, let’s be clear here. I love my sis to pieces (Hi, D!) and I’d give her a kidney and a lung if she needed them. But just imagine two newlyweds and an opinionated teenager, thrown together, with the teenager feeling her teritory was invaded and the young couple transitioning from sweet solitude to living with someone thay cannot control and cannot escape from .. and neither of parties knowing how long this situation will last. Let’s just say there was a lot less fooling around and a lot more fighting (although not between the opposite sexes) than you’d expect from your first two years of marriage.
Eventually things started to work out, after my parents started to build an extension to their house for li’l sis and living together turned into long periods of more-or-less getting along interrupted by short periods of cursing and hissing. We somehow managed to have a baby, which she’s in love with (and the feelings are mutual as far as I know) , she graduated from highschool and went to University in Bucharest. We meet a few times a year and now that the living-together factor is out, we are able to enjoy meeting each other and actually look forward to it. Thank God, as she seems more and more to grow into a person I like to be friends with. But I digress.
The furniture of our appartment was bought by my parents, some of it while they weren’t even thinking of having us , so it’s a mixture of the ’70s and the ’80s with a bit of the ’90s thrown in . The tiles in the bathrooms and kitchen are the same as when they bought the appartment in ‘91. The painting was changed once (in ‘95? ‘96?). We didn’t had the money to renovate all at once so we went with the Christine approach -a new furniture in this room ,a new painting in the same room a year after, not much logic involved.
Sooo.. kitchen furniture. Ours was a disaster, communist low quality at its finest (Americans, think Formica manufactured by drunk workers). Doorknobs were missing, doors were falling out, cupboard backs were separating from the rest of the cupboard walls and going on spiritual journeys to find their hidden wood-ness. Robi kept on repairing it, but we knew we needed a new one. We looked here and there but what we saw was either too pricy or too reminding of the looks or quality of what we had at home (much like the reason for the fidelity of the cheapskates, somebody suggests).
But the more Dana (the nurse ) was telling me about the one they were selling, the more I liked it. No using, wood, no ornaments, no glass involved. I asked for the price - 6 millions. (around 200$). That, my friends, is low even by Romanian standards.
*I’ll tell you the rest soon but the kid’s up so duty calls*