Furnishing my home

US is a strange place. Here services are really expensive especially the ones that involve physical labour. For example - to get a plumber to repair your faucet would take nearly 40 dollars... totally different from how India operates... where we are so used to cheap labor.

Anyways we (me and my roommate) figured out that to get furniture for our home, we would have to do it ourselves, else it would be too damn expensive... So after some intense browsing through the different sales in different parts fo the town in websites, we finalized on a couple of deals - couch, mattress (my roomie had one, I was sleeping on a thin comforter on the carpet floor) etc...
We then decided to rent a U-haul - a truck renting company which helps in moving stuff, there was a maddening rush for trucks as it was month end... Anyway finally we managed to get a pickup truck which was open at the top - thought that would suffice... We were told that the pick-up location for the truck was in the twin city St. Paul which was around 10 miles from our place...

We then decided to get the directions to the different places through google maps. We would first go and get the truck and then go get the mattress and then the couch and then back home... We had no idea of what an eventful day we were going to have.

We went to the U-haul office and that guy said that there was no reservation in our name... We were shocked and then he checked and said that they had the reservation for 5:30 and it was 3:30...

No point in going back to minneapolis... my friend started feeling hungry and we decided to eat at a Chinese place... I ordered for Chicken Fried Rice and my friend ordered the solitary vegetarian dish... The fried rice was good but the quantity was way too much - I had that till sunday night - three times! my friend was clearly struggling with his vegetarian dish... He said that he was a "bakra" even in the literal sense... He struggled with the vegetation that was given to him and some white "stuff" (which resembled a tail and a small head) - they called it mushrooms but I had my own doubts. I aired them to him and that was the end of his lunch - he decided he had enough of the stuff...

We went back and took the truck which was now ready (we had it till 9 am in the morning). We then headed for the first destination "mattress" After following the directions, we realised that the map was not too good... We missed an exit thanks to it.. We decided to call the person and tried to figure out the direction... He said head on West Drive Road and take a turn at mississipi drive in... We did that and we came to a locality but we could not locate his number... Then he said there are two mississipi drives on west river road!! Then we went ahead and we saw that this road turned into some russel drive - Now we were totally lost!!

Now where do we go - my roomie said with a gulp - I am completely lost man, no idea what to do... We then landed in a supermarket for some help with directions, where they gave us a book which had all the maps and there we realized that there were two west river roads and they both had mississipi drives!! Crazy...

Finally we reached the house we intended to and then slowly started uploading the King Size bed. A king size bed has a steel frame and then two box springs and then a mattress on top (similar to a double bed in India)... It took about half an hour to load into the truck and the huge mattress was quite a pain - we managed to keep it vertically along with the boxes...


Then we slowly started driving to the location where we would get the coach... As we were taking an exit - I suddenly exclaimed - Hey where is the mattress.. My friend turned back and he was also equally shocked - It had fallen off!!! Now this was really not what we had planned for... we drove back and we saw that the mattress had fallen on the side of the freeway and we could not park our truck in the freeway - so we had to keep it around 50 metres off the place as it had fallen off near an exit and then slowly haul it manually!! It was quite an exercise and we finally got it into the truck and drove on to the place where we could get the couch!!

When we reached there after getting lost a couple of times (we were getting used to this by now - seemed to be the norm of the day). The person was kind enough to keep the couch in his driveway - we loaded the couch on to the truck and drove down to our place...

After a lot of struggle and three trips in the freight elevator aat our place , we managed to get the couch and the mattress into the house and set it up - Then we went to drop off the truck, we left the truck in the shed and by the time we reached home it was around 11:30 pm!! A really hectic Saturday - sat down and watched the ending half an hour of "My cousin Vinny" on TV and slept off

Sunday morning: we were up at 7 as we had to drop off the keys of the truck at U-haul. After we dropped it off, we drove another 20 miles to a location called Eden Prairie where we would get the dining table, computer table and some chairs...

When we reached there, we realized that we had more stuff than we can handle for the car... Luckily they could be dismantled... so slowly we started getting the furniture dismatled part by part. I had my eyes set on the office chair which was also part of the deal, but my friend it was too bulky for the car... But I decided that we would take it one way or the other... We loaded the dismatled stuff and then tried putting the chair in the backseat - It was too big too go in one piece...

The inevitable was that we had to leave it there!! I was quite dissapointed but then checked out the bottom of the revolving office chair and realized that it could also be dismatled - we did that and then managed to fit it into the car and drove back home...

My friend and I started discussing that we could start this as a part-time business as we were getting pretty good at moving stuff. Finally we got them to our home and set it up, which took about an hour or so...

It was totally worth it - now we had a couch to sit, a computer table to work, and more importantly I had a bed to sleep. The bed was awesome - a huge bed with springs for extra comfort - it was quite comfortable considering that I used to sleep on the comforter on the carpet floor before!!

At the end of the exercise, I realised how important it is to be self-sufficient here... you had to do everything yourself - you wash your own clothes, you iron your own clothes - you even move your own stuff. One cannot rely on getting help as it was way too expensive... It is so different from India, where we are so used to getting labourers/porters etc to carry our stuff and at extremely low prices... I realised the value of these people this weekend!