La Sofa Cama (1)

I never did manage to start hand sewing my curtains as we had a more important project on hand – moving the sofa cama.

The background to this post is part of our ‘house trials’ and is typical of events occurring in recent months. When we employed our building project manager back in August of last year, he assured us that the work we wanted done in la casa would take 8 – 10 weeks, starting immediately. I will write a whole section about what actually occurred, but for now I will just say that as of today, 21st March 2007, the work is still not completed.

However, when it looked like work would be delayed, the project manager gave us several new ‘completion dates’, the ultimate one being the first week in December 2006. As we had sold or disposed of most of our UK furniture we had to buy new and this was something we had been looking forward to – moving into a new home with new furniture. But to do this we obviously had to order the furniture so that it arrived just before we moved in.

So we went out furniture shopping in November 2006, asking the vendors to hold on to the furniture for a few weeks. This was agreed by all, but all of the vendors wanted a fixed delivery date and said that they could not hold on to the furniture later than the second week in December. But this was not a problem (or so we thought), as the work on la casa woud be completed a week before this date.

Of course, that didn’t happen. By the second week in December our house was still full of rubble, building materials and the occasional workman. To make matters worse, one day during that week a representative from Endessa, the electrics company, called and, saying that our electric meter was unsafe, disabled our electrics! It was cold and dark in la casa. At that stage the only energy we had was electric (or at least it had been!) and we were at a very low ebb.

But the furniture still had to be delivered. The muebles companies were sympathetic but insisted on delivery. To make matters even worse, we had also arranged for the delivery of items we had brought out from the UK (a whole storage room full) and which were in storage in Northern Spain, as we could no longer afford the high storage costs.

So, during the second week of December, we took delivery of the contents of a large storage room; two full bedroom suites (including 3 beds); various items of dining room furniture; a large computer desk and chair; a large reclining chair; and a very large sofa cama.

Our casa is pequenia, but our list of prospective visitors is large, so a good sofa cama was a must; along with the beds it would provide sleeping accomodation for 4 extra adults or even more adults and children. We had carefully checked the dimensions of our lounge and the width of doors so we knew the maximum size our sofa cama could be – at least we thought we did!

As it turned out, none of the furniture could be left downstairs in our lounge which was still full of building materials, so everything had to be carried upstairs and put in the bedrooms (of which there are only 2). We had nowhere else for it.

The first items to arrive were the reclining chair and sofa cama. We explained to the delivery men that both had to go ‘arriba’. They were not particularly haopy about this as both were very heavy but they agreed to take them upstairs with our help.

The recliner was relatively easy but the sofa cama was something else!

The sofa cama came through the door into the lounge and then had to be turned to go up the stairs. Now our stairway, relatively speaking, is the only large area in our house. It is very wide and the main ceiling is very high, but the stairs are very steep and the bottom of the stairwell has a lowered ceiling. It took 4 people nearly an hour to get the sofa cama up the stairs with lots of heaving, twisting and alternating cries of “venga!”, “no te mueves!” and “venga!” We took the bedroom door off and, at last, the sofa cama was in the main bedroom. One of the workmen (who had watched but refused to participate in the operation) commented, “Well it’s up there, but I’m not sure you’ll ever get it down again!”.

How right he was!

Now it is March and las obras are almost completed, we are ready to move into our house. But to do so we have to reorganize all the furniture and storage items. We have managed to move the storage items to the roof terrace (up a ladder as, until yesterday, we had no stairs to the terrace) and there is a little more room now for us to move items around. The lounge is now almost finished so all dining room and lounge furniture can go down there which will allow the man who delivered our bedroom suites to actually come back and build them (in Spain you usually buy furniture which is delivered and assembled on site) as he had no room to do this back in December. But to allow enough room in our bedroom fora full bedroom suite we need to bring the recliner and the sofa cama downstairs. Easier said than done.

The recliner came downstairs easily and at least we now have one easy chair in our lounge plus a computer chair to sit on. But the sofa cama is something else!

We were talking about just how to move the sofa cama last week but I was chickening out – I am not particularly strong and my husband, although strong, is not Superman. We decided we needed help.

As luck would have it (or so we thought at the time), that evening came a knock on our door. It was an Englishman who had just bought a house in the village and was calling to introduce himself. He looked reasonable strong so, after a friendly chat over coffee (I really must get some wine and beer in!), we asked him if he would be willing to help us move the sofa cama. After looking at it he reluctantly agreed, but, as it was getting late, he said he would come back at the weekend to help. “Great!” we thought, “we will soon be able to move in!”.

Saturday came but we had a ‘problem’ with our car (see ‘He perdido mis llaves de coche!’) and couldn’t get to la casa but, never mind, the Englishman (I’ll call him ‘Clive’) had given us his address so we would be able to call on him on Sunday and ask for his help.

Sunday came and, after a visit to ‘La policia local’ (see ‘He perdido mis llaves de coche’), we went to la casa. After sorting out clothes washing, exercising and feeding the dog and all the other things we do on arrival, we went to look for Clive.

Now our village, like villages worldwide, has a wierd system of naming streets – they wind around corners, across roads, suddenly disappear, and sometimes they don’t seem to exist. Clive’s street was one of the latter. We searched the village several times and, although we found a couple of likely houses, we couldn’t be sure. Never mind, we knocked on the doors anyway, only to be met by surprised residents who had never heard of an Englishman named Clive.

So back to the drawing board. We had to move the sofa cama, but how to manage it?

Well, our neighbours are friendly and usually very helpful (they think we are a little strange but that doesn’t matter!). They can usually understand our faltering Spanish too, but on this occasion everyone we spoke to said the same – “lo siento, pero no entiendo!”. Probably what I would have said too!

But never mind. Taking a heavy item downstairs must surely be easier than taking it upstairs. Shouldn’t it? Of course not! We took off the bedroom door, took all the heavy cushions off the sofa cama and heaved it through the bedroom door. Only to be met with an impossble feat – how to get the thing downstairs, twist it around at the bottom and upend it to get it into the lounge, when it still seemed to weigh a ton and the stairs are so steep that there was no way of sliding it down. I did try putting mattresses down the stairs to raise them and make a constant slide, but that only raised the level too high for the bottom ceiling. My husband said that no way was he going to risk losing hold of the thing and have it crashing into the wall at the bottom, ruining the plaster, breaking the tiles and possibly breaking the thing itself.

So we gave up, heaved it back into the bedroom and decided to wait until we could find Clive.

But that was only the start. More to come.