G and I are now the proud owners of a flat. Or, more accurately, G and I are the proud owners of a contract entitling us to purchase a flat on 27 August 2009.
Getting to this stage has not been without its difficulties. On top of the delays, there have been minor disasters. Perhaps the greatest disaster was the death of the flat’s dishwasher. By that, I mean the mechanical apparatus, rather than the seller of the flat, who (judging by the flat’s present state of cleanliness) has never washed anything in his life.
On the day we were due to exchange contracts, we received an email from our solicitor along the lines of “I’ve just been told, by the way, that the dishwasher in the flat broke some weeks ago and cannot be repaired. So you’re buying a flat without a dishwasher now.”
Losing a dishwasher may not sound like such a calamitous event, but to understand just how it affected us to hear those shocking words, one perhaps needs to know a little of our history of dishwashers and the central role they have played in our lives.
This requires going back to the days when I was 20 and G was 21 and we were living together for the first time in a house on Weld Street in Perth, Australia. Weld Street (as we called the house) rivalled the one-month flat as the worst home in which we have ever lived. It was a tiny two-bedroom worker’s cottage, built in the 50s. The floors were laid with floorboards with large gaps between them, through which weeds, cockroaches and spiders would frequently visit. The hot cockroach-filled summers in Perth meant there was a nightly ritual of me standing on top of the sofa screaming while G ran around the house mounting a counter-insurgency on the cockroaches with a can of bug spray.
The loo at Weld Street was outside the main house, in the laundry. While there was a covered veranda connecting the laundry to the rest of the house, the weeds grew so thickly between the gaps in the boards on the veranda that we properly regarded that area as “outdoors”.
The house was not equipped with a dishwasher. Indeed, in the tiny kitchen, there was barely room for two people, let alone a dishwasher. It was therefore with some excitement that, on a late-night walk around the neighbourhood, G and I discovered an abandoned dishwasher on a neighbour’s lawn. Dishwashers with plumbing were invented around 1920. I suspect this dishwasher was one of the prototypes. It was a mustard colour, with enamel inside and wood veneer stuck on the outside of it. It had a sign placed on top of it: “still working, please take me”. That was all the encouragement we needed.
G somehow managed to convince his father, at that late hour, to come around with his enormous car and help us to get the thing back to our house. G’s father, ever the gentleman, did nothing more than raise an eyebrow at this odd adventure.
Not having enough room in the kitchen, we “installed” our new dishwasher in the laundry, next to the loo. It worked beautifully, with only one minor problem. The first time I turned it on, I felt an incredible thump up my arm. Not knowing what caused this bizarre feeling, I of course immediately touched the dishwasher again, only to discover that once more I felt a thump up my arm. After several such tests gave the same result, and one nearly thew me across the room, I realised that this thump was, in fact, an electric shock. G and I puzzled over what we should do about this latest turn of events. Neither of us ever contemplated that we would not use the dishwasher. Instead, we used our rudimentary knowledge of science to come to the conclusion that, since rubber does not conduct electricity, whenever we were using the dishwasher we would wear rubber gloves and boots. And that is how we loaded and unloaded the dishwasher for the next few months, until we finally had the good sense to move to a slightly more luxurious student pad. This method still resulted in the occasional electric shock being felt, but we were quite confident that our scientific method would prevent us coming to any real harm.
Notwithstanding its difficulties and limitations, G and I loved that dishwasher. The taste of life without handwashing dishes was such that we could never go back. And we haven’t. It has always been a golden rule of rentals or purchases that they simply must have a dishwasher. It was therefore with some pain that we learnt we were losing the dishwasher at the new flat. We negotiated a small discount in the price to compensate for the loss, but have already resigned ourselves to the fact that, even if we have to pay for it entirely on our credit cards, the first purchase in our new flat will be a shiny new dishwasher.
Getting to this stage has not been without its difficulties. On top of the delays, there have been minor disasters. Perhaps the greatest disaster was the death of the flat’s dishwasher. By that, I mean the mechanical apparatus, rather than the seller of the flat, who (judging by the flat’s present state of cleanliness) has never washed anything in his life.
On the day we were due to exchange contracts, we received an email from our solicitor along the lines of “I’ve just been told, by the way, that the dishwasher in the flat broke some weeks ago and cannot be repaired. So you’re buying a flat without a dishwasher now.”
Losing a dishwasher may not sound like such a calamitous event, but to understand just how it affected us to hear those shocking words, one perhaps needs to know a little of our history of dishwashers and the central role they have played in our lives.
This requires going back to the days when I was 20 and G was 21 and we were living together for the first time in a house on Weld Street in Perth, Australia. Weld Street (as we called the house) rivalled the one-month flat as the worst home in which we have ever lived. It was a tiny two-bedroom worker’s cottage, built in the 50s. The floors were laid with floorboards with large gaps between them, through which weeds, cockroaches and spiders would frequently visit. The hot cockroach-filled summers in Perth meant there was a nightly ritual of me standing on top of the sofa screaming while G ran around the house mounting a counter-insurgency on the cockroaches with a can of bug spray.
The loo at Weld Street was outside the main house, in the laundry. While there was a covered veranda connecting the laundry to the rest of the house, the weeds grew so thickly between the gaps in the boards on the veranda that we properly regarded that area as “outdoors”.
The house was not equipped with a dishwasher. Indeed, in the tiny kitchen, there was barely room for two people, let alone a dishwasher. It was therefore with some excitement that, on a late-night walk around the neighbourhood, G and I discovered an abandoned dishwasher on a neighbour’s lawn. Dishwashers with plumbing were invented around 1920. I suspect this dishwasher was one of the prototypes. It was a mustard colour, with enamel inside and wood veneer stuck on the outside of it. It had a sign placed on top of it: “still working, please take me”. That was all the encouragement we needed.
G somehow managed to convince his father, at that late hour, to come around with his enormous car and help us to get the thing back to our house. G’s father, ever the gentleman, did nothing more than raise an eyebrow at this odd adventure.
Not having enough room in the kitchen, we “installed” our new dishwasher in the laundry, next to the loo. It worked beautifully, with only one minor problem. The first time I turned it on, I felt an incredible thump up my arm. Not knowing what caused this bizarre feeling, I of course immediately touched the dishwasher again, only to discover that once more I felt a thump up my arm. After several such tests gave the same result, and one nearly thew me across the room, I realised that this thump was, in fact, an electric shock. G and I puzzled over what we should do about this latest turn of events. Neither of us ever contemplated that we would not use the dishwasher. Instead, we used our rudimentary knowledge of science to come to the conclusion that, since rubber does not conduct electricity, whenever we were using the dishwasher we would wear rubber gloves and boots. And that is how we loaded and unloaded the dishwasher for the next few months, until we finally had the good sense to move to a slightly more luxurious student pad. This method still resulted in the occasional electric shock being felt, but we were quite confident that our scientific method would prevent us coming to any real harm.
Notwithstanding its difficulties and limitations, G and I loved that dishwasher. The taste of life without handwashing dishes was such that we could never go back. And we haven’t. It has always been a golden rule of rentals or purchases that they simply must have a dishwasher. It was therefore with some pain that we learnt we were losing the dishwasher at the new flat. We negotiated a small discount in the price to compensate for the loss, but have already resigned ourselves to the fact that, even if we have to pay for it entirely on our credit cards, the first purchase in our new flat will be a shiny new dishwasher.
Congrats on finally sealing the deal! Am loving the adventures of your lives in London. I look forward to the story of the move in - no doubt filled with hilarious incident (you've got to laugh!)
ReplyDeleteThat's such a beautiful note. It also made me laugh! Thanks for sharing. f
ReplyDelete