Settling in Groningen (Or, How to Furnish an Apartment for 1000 Euros or Less)

Our local IKEA

Settling in Groningen has been a process.  Six weeks after our arrival, it is still not complete.

Of course, there was the paperwork for everything from obtaining a burgerservicenummer (a Dutch social security number) and a residence permit to registering for a special card that opens the curbside rubbish bins.

Because we rented an unfurnished apartment, settling here also meant that we would need to find some furniture - and fast! We had only one week after our arrival until my husband started working full-time at his lab, so if I was going to make use of his furniture-lifting prowess and construction skills, I would need to find as much of the heavy furniture as possible during that first week, and wait to do the small stuff, like curtains, later.  Otherwise, we'd be spending some more quality time with the air mattress that we'd brought along in one of our suitcases from the USA.  Additionally, due to the transaction costs associated with exchanging our US dollars for the almighty euro, we attempted to due this on a rather tight budget: 1000 euros.

The time constraints and the budget meant that we had very few options with respect to how we would furnish our place.  For the sake of simplicity, we decided that furniture would come from 3 sources:  the secondhand furniture institution in Groningen known as Mamamini, IKEA, and a facebook group full of Groningers advertising their used furniture (which just happens to originate mostly from IKEA).

This might have been very easy if we'd had an Internet connection when we moved into our apartment. However, we did not have an Internet connection, so we had to walk back and forth to the local IKEA (about a 30 minute walk away - no bikes yet!), the local Mamamini (about a 20 minute walk away), and use a local cafe's Wifi to keep track of good deals on facebook - every day for a week.

A bakfiets: it's how furniture is moved here in Groningen

Despite this, in just that first week, we managed to find a bed, a 3-seater sofa, a desk, a secondhand dining table, 4 chairs (2 of which were secondhand), a wardrobe (no closets in our apartment!), secondhand shelves, a secondhand espresso machine, and a very lovely secondhand orchid plant for a total of about 800 euros. We would not have niceties like curtains, trash bins, light fixtures (the apartment came without those too!), or dishes and cooking utensils (except the few that were packed in our suitcase) for another week or so.

To completely understate things: we really missed all that furniture that was in storage back in the USA!  If we were to do it over again, we might have shipped it all over here to avoid the hassle of locating and assembling suitable furniture, but hindsight is 20/20, and we probably would have spent too much in shipping costs anyhow.

I'll end this post with a scene from our furniture assembly marathon:

 
By the way, those smiling cartoons in the IKEA manual failed to provide an accurate portrayal of the range of emotions (i.e. anger, fear, frustration, anxiety, destructiveness) experienced when assembling our bed frame.