A Day of Shopping and Driving

Our first weekend in Scotland started a bit slowly, as the kids took a bit of a lie-in and slept until 11 am or so. That gave me a much-needed chance to get up early and do some work, as I am way behind schedule given the two separate moves. I had planned to have a little home-office corner set up in the dining room by now, but moving into this house has been a bit slower than I had anticipated. I am slowly warming up to the house in the end, and having it chock full of our stuff is helping a bit, if only because all of our things hide some of the dirt! I am working on the dirt and dust a bit at a time as well, and after a week or so I think I may make this place passable after all.

By far the best thing going for this house is the location, and for that reason alone this was the right choice for us. Emma and David can easily get back and forth to school on their own, and we have all of the shops and services in town literally at our doorstep. St. Andrews is a wonderfully beautiful and fascinating place, full of windy little streets, castle and cathedral ruins, two beaches, great food shops, a library, and all the little stores that cater to a student clientele, and it’s so convenient to be able to walk through all of that at any point in the day. We also have the Lade Braes path at our doorstep, which means we have a ready-made way to entertain Leah without resorting to Peppa Pig videos. There are two playgrounds along the Lade Braes, plus various stone bridges, small waterfalls, families of ducks, hidden doorways, and bunches of snowdrops peeking out from the stone walls on either side…perfect for a toddler with a sturdy pair of wellies. On top of all of this, we have a walled garden of our own, with three tiers full of perennials, a deck with an outdoor table for meals in warmer weather, and a tree with low hanging branches that are perfect for Leah to climb. There’s a stone walkway that moves between the three tiers, with wonderful lights at each step, and in the evening the effect is really magical. The stairs are a bit steep for Leah, but she is learning to manage them well.

The inside of the house is less magical, I’m afraid. It does have a very strange layout, and though we have been here for three days, I still couldn’t draw a layout of this house on paper. It’s built into a wall, and there’s no front door or front façade which proves confusing. It’s an angular house, so none of the walls meet at a 90 degree angle, and all of the windows are of different sizes, so it’s hard to tell when looking at the house from the outside which rooms are where on the inside. It’s also typical of the other Scottish homes I have seen in that each room has its own door, and those doors are typically left closed. The concept of the open floor plan hasn’t taken off in this country, so this is pretty standard. So, when you do manage to find a hallway, you can’t tell which door leads to a bathroom, a laundry room, or the family room. I’m trying to leave the doors open as much as possible to keep from walking into the wrong room all the time, but since the rooms are built at an angle to each other, it’s still unclear what is where because all you can see from the hallway is a series of blank white walls. It’s very disorienting.

On the first floor, we do have a really lovely dining room which has a huge white-lacquered table at the center with eight metal chairs around it. This room has a full wall of windows and doors that open to the patio, and now that those windows aren’t filthy (see previous post…) it’s quite nice. There’s a bit of storage at the back wall from a set of metal industrial-style bookcases, though we are trying not to use those too much as they aren’t mounted to the wall and I don’t want Leah to try to reach something on them and pull them down on herself. Next to the dining room is a large kitchen, with mint green cabinets with wood countertops. The whole house is done in a kind of industrial mint green, stainless steel and white (or what I assumed was white when it was first painted and was cleaner…) and it really does look great. The kitchen is functional too, though we did have to move almost everything around in the first day to make things work for us (pots and pans should go near the stove, dishes near the refrigerator, and cutting boards near the sink, right? Or am I just crazy? I assumed this was a universal…). There’s a staircase outside the kitchen, with a little alcove under it that doesn’t lead anywhere. We filled this space with a little pop-up tent that looks like a castle that is serving as Leah’s playhouse/toy storage. There’s also a closet there, though it doesn’t actually have anything in it but a bizarrely-placed towel bar on one side (what the heck?). We are piling our coats and shoes in a big heap on the floor there for now, waiting to come up with a better solution. The family room is behind the closet (at a weird 76 degree angle), and that has in it one futon, one broken chair, and two big white baskets on pedestals in which someone could possibly sit if supplied with enough pillows. There’s a coffee table in the middle with a glass top and a drawer set underneath, and the owner is displaying a collection of old albums underneath the glass. Emma and David love this, but Leah won’t go near it as she finds the picture on the front of the Eurythmics “Touch” album a bit frightening. Finally, there’s a bathroom that has a tub and a shower (though no mirror or storage), and a master bedroom with a wardrobe in it, which means in that room we actually do have room to store some of our things. Upstairs are two more bedrooms (Emma has one with a beautiful view over the town, and John and Leah are sharing the one with a lovely view of the stuccoed house next door), two closets, and a bathroom with just a shower. The second floor of the house is only half the size of the first floor, and I think the kitchen and dining room part of the house are one story, but again it’s hard to tell from looking at the house (bizarre, right?).

Leah's under-the-stairs playspot

 So, to remedy some of this, we had planned to drive back to Edinburgh today to stop at the IKEA and gather some items to make the house more liveable for the next few months. We had to go back anyway, since John had left his phone at the car dealer, so we figured this would work well. Leah and I had ventured into town in the morning while everyone else slept in, and we stopped at the library to renew our cards and ducked into the bakery for some fudge donuts (a St. Andrews thing). When we returned to the house, everyone was up and having leftovers from lunch. We headed out around two, after we managed to learn a bit more about the GPS in the rental car. At this point, we can at least input a postcode as a destination and so that does get us close to where we want to go. We made it to the car dealer after about an hour, though at one point we had to drive over a small stone bridge that was so narrow that we were sure we were headed in the wrong direction. We actually sat in front of the bridge, on the road, and waited until a car managed to cross in the other direction until we were confident that it was actually passable and that one could make it through with both sideview mirrors still intact. We stopped at the car dealership, retrieved the phone, and then fiddled with the GPS for another 20 minutes until we managed to input a destination that seemed close to the IKEA. Another 20 minutes later we had arrived at that destination, though there was no IKEA in sight. I resorted to using my phone at that point, and we headed back out on the road to try again. Another 20 minutes later, we had passed through a series of confusing roundabouts, senseless intersections, blocked entrances, one way roads, and off-limits loading zones, and neither David nor I were speaking to each other. David shoehorned the car into the tiniest parking spot I had ever seen and we set off on foot in search of some kitchenware and Swedish meatballs.

Leah meets her first fudge donut.

 We were at IKEA for over two hours, which gave us plenty of time to have dinner, change a nappy, explore the kiddy play place, and rehash the drive (“Why didn’t you just tell me that was the entrance?” and “Well, I would have if you weren’t driving so fast!” and “Well, everyone was driving that fast!” and “Well, everyone knows where they are going!”). We spent about an hour of that time shopping, and picked up some dishes, kitchen supplies, reading lamps, a clothes rack for the closet, and some suction-cupped storage for the bathrooms. Leah found a little doll bed that she liked, so we picked up that as well, and John found a stuffed soccer ball that he decided needed to be put into immediate use just as we passed through the wineglasses. It was not the most relaxing shopping trip, to say the least, and we were relieved at last to be loading our things into the back of the rental car (as were most of the IKEA employees who had been watching John and Leah tear through the store, I’m sure). As we loaded, we actually ran into the family from South Carolina that we met at the airport, which was incredible, and planned to get together with them sometime later in the semester. With the car loaded, we drove off, ready to go home and figure out how to assemble our coat rack using only a butter knife for a screwdriver and a heavy shoe for a hammer!