Lazy sunday

It has become something of a routine for us to have a slow start on a Sunday and for The Man to work his magic in the kitchen and make us a yummy bacon, egg, mushroom and tomatoes. Mmmmm. And today was no different.

Today is the day for the London Marathon and there was no way we wanted to be anywhere near the centre of the city. Apart from rod closures and train disruptions the thought of the crowd was enough to put us right off going anywhere near it.

With no destination in mind we did go out in the early afternoon and wound up on a tram and found ourselves at IKEA. Haven’t been here since before we moved to Crystal Palace more than a year ago. There are so many great furnishing and decorating ideas there. And there is a huge variety of storage solutions for all the rooms in the house.  It does bring home to us the difference in size between the large and comfortable room sizes of houses back home in NZ to the often minuscule rooms here in England. Would you believe that there are no rules about how small a room you can build? So without rules new builds can have tiny spaces.  We spent our fits year here in a tiny one room studio. Studio is in reality a euphemism for a bedsit.  Everything in one room. That might not sound very nice accommodation but compared to what we had been shown it was pretty good. Then when we were looking for something with a bit more space we were shown some pretty awful places including one that had no windows at all. In fact it was in a basement that ran under the road. When I commented about the lack of windows the girls showing it to us said, ‘Windows, you want windows, come and look at this one next door’. Which we did and it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. Yes, she was right. It did have one, a tiny non opening window in a minute shower room/toilet.  So we kept looking and were shown some substandard flats, I told one agent that I would let my dog live in it let alone people. Having decided after much exploring that Crystal palace would be a good place to live, and it was relatively easy for both of us to get to work we visited an agent in the area. During the weeks we were looking we had seen pictures of one that had bare concrete floors and I have to admit didn’t look very nice at all. And I recognised it when an agent mentioned it to us. ‘Not interested in anything like that’ we told her.  She said that the landlord was in the throes of refurbishing it and that it defiantly was worth a look.  And thankfully she was right. 

Our lounge window faces east so we don't usually see much of the sunset, but last night the setting sun was reflected in the distance clouds