Sitting on the floor really hurts - especially on this dodgy wooden floor - it's cold and hard and unforgiving, and it hurts your back to sit for too long. Not good for two nerds looking for their internet fix. We hunted for furniture stores, but only one of them was on the subway line, so we decided to bite the bullet and hire a car for the day.
6 furniture stores later, we bought a couch, table and 4 chairs for around $1600 delivered - not too bad. Somewhat amusingly, the guy kept trying to sell us his furniture protection plan, which I wasn't interested in - he kept going down in price until he threw it in for free. I'm not really sure what benefit that had to him or why he'd do that - we had already said that we were buying the furniture and the price was agreed, why would he give us things for free? Any salespeople want to explain this one to me?
We couldn't hack another night sitting on the floor while we were waiting for the furniture to be delivered, so we bought some barstools on the way home (along with a washing basket, mop/bucket, and a few more bulky or awkward home items - taking advantage of the car while we had it!).
Unfortunately, this morning at delivery time, things turned a bit sour - our new chaise lounge couldn't fit in the elevator. Apparently instead of breaking into a 2-seater and a chaise, it breaks into a 3-seater and an ottoman - so it didn't fit. I'm pretty angry - we couldn't know from looking at it on the sales floor that it broke up that way, and the salesman knew we lived in a condo apartment and didn't say that there would be a problem. Now I imagine that we're going to have a fight on our hands to get the money refunded, and we'll probably have to fight against some sort of failed delivery fee. Not very happy.
On the upside, the table did fit in the lift, so we now have a table and some chairs.
We're starting to settle in now - I did some laundry yesterday, and I've decided that having a communal laundromat downstairs is actually pretty awesome, because you can use multiple machines to do multiple loads at the same time rather than one after the other - I'm a big fan. Plus, these washing machines tell you how long until they're finished, so it's a simple matter of going down to the basement, putting the washing on, coming back upstairs and then going back down to the basement once it's finished - no waiting around.
Stephen bought some running shoes from the local Running Room and he's off testing them on a short run now - the Running Room runs a lot of clubs and training courses, and apparently they have a 16 week marathon coaching course that sounds pretty good, starting in January. The benefit for us would be not only the training but also the prospect of making some new friends in the area, so we're pretty keen to give it a shot - we were having a good laugh over the fact that (if our couch was delivered) we would have had 10 seats in our house and still just the two of us to sit on them, so we need to get out there and meet people.
We've both applied for some jobs - Stephen's applied for a few .NET developer jobs in the area, and I've applied for a couple of Christmas retail casual jobs (mainly to meet people and get out of the house while I'm studying full-time until February). I had a phone screen for one of mine this morning, and I have an interview on Monday - if they decide they want me, I'll be paid a whopping $11.25 an hour (ouch). Stephen hasn't heard back about any of his jobs yet - what's the usual time period that you'd expect to wait to hear from a potential employer after submitting your resume?
Now, if you'll excuse me, now that we have a table, I have some serious gaming to catch up on :)
The protection deal, as I understand it, is so they can ring up as you buying the furniture at $1600-X (where X is the original price of the protection deal) and the protection deal for $X. Being able to say "well we only sold these for $1600-X" then impacts upon their negotiations with their suppliers while the protection deal is generally pure profit. I've had Dick Smith pull the same job here.
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