Finally the time came to move into our permanent apartment. Luckily for us, December 1st was a Monday. This meant that the handover inspection from the previous tenant couldn’t occur on the last day of their tenancy, a Sunday, and the handover was done on Friday evening instead. This gave us the whole weekend to move in.

In another fortuitous piece of timing, Mark’s father was in Austria (accompanying Susannah, Mark’s sister, to a ski school in Leogang) at around this time and he was able to come to stay with us beginning a couple of days before the move. Marion’s parents also came down from Ludwigsburg for the weekend. The parental assistance from both sides was very much appreciated.

A complex plan was hatched to move all our belongings from the temporary apartment, clean up there for handover, receive the container from Australia (including such luxuries as our own beds to sleep in) at the new apartment and make sure the twins didn’t get maimed under-foot in the bustle, or otherwise injure themselves in the new environment.

One hiccup came three days before the move when the internet service to our temporary apartment was suspended. It turned out that the previous bill hadn’t been paid on time, and though it was now paid the ISP wasn’t going to reconnect until after we moved out. Ordinarily this would be a minor nuisance. But with so much to organise around the move, it was a serious handicap. For example, we were using Mobility to rent a van for some of the move and we needed to modify our booking over the internet. We were also planning to use internet banking to pay the bond on the new apartment: if the bond wasn’t paid on time, we would be homeless until it was.

In Basel, and in many parts of older Europe, furniture can only be brought into the upper levels of many houses directly from the outside, because the stairwells are too narrow. In Amsterdam, the protruding beams on its terrace houses are famous for this purpose. The modern solution is a furniture lift, a clever device that folds out from a trailer to form a telescopic vertical conveyor belt. The removalists erected this against our fifth floor balcony in a matter of minutes, and a stream of boxes began flowing up the lift and into our lounge room, where Mark frantically tried to work out where everything should go.

When you rent an apartment in Switzerland, you are supposed to bring your own lamps. Each room has a hole in the ceiling with two wires protruding from it. Needless to say, we hadn’t brought our own light fittings with us from Australia, so thankfully Marion’s father had a few spare light bulb sockets which he lent us until we could buy appropriate lamps. Otherwise we would have been stumbling around a dark unfamiliar apartment soon after dusk.

There’s something unnerving about having a pair of exposed wires, potentially carrying 230V, hanging above your head while moving tall items of furniture around. The Swiss light switches, simple toggle buttons from which it is impossible to know whether they are on or off, don’t help. The feeling is exacerbated by having two hyper-stimulated three-year-olds running about opening boxes, potentially finding metal curtain rods. No-one was electrocuted, but it did make for a certain level of, well, high tension.

Although we had been living mostly from suitcases for four months, we had still accumulated a couple of cubic metres of additional clothing, furniture and toys. This, combined with substantially more than one hundred boxes from the container, spilled into the generous space of the new apartment with nowhere to go. In Australia, our house has numerous shelves, cupboards and wardrobes; the new apartment, a modernist style space bounded by sheer white walls and glass sliding doors, has relatively few. So until we could buy some storage furniture, Mark’s father’s bed in the guest room was literally surrounded by high walls of removalist boxes.

The apartment came with a 5cm thick folder of instructions and rules. Since we weren’t given this until a few days after moving in, we were unaware of the detailed requirements for moving day, such as explicitly instructing the removalists to be careful of the parquetry — yes, this is written in the house rules.

Amongst other regulations are airing your apartment three times per day for fifteen minutes, regularly wet-wiping the parquetry with the cloth provided (indeed, a plastic envelope in the folder contained a soft mesh cloth), cleaning the bathtub only with soap and a soft brush, and washing your section of the cellar at least once per year. The long list of things that are forbidden includes washing pets in the garden, playing music with your windows open, filling or emptying the bathtub after 10pm, shaking out table cloths from the balconies, or hanging up laundry on the balcony facing the Rhine river. At least we now have our own washing machine, even if there are limits on what time of day we can use it. We were also required to order and pay for the engraved steel name plates for our mailbox and doorbell, to be made in the specified font and character size, and fitting the spaces allocated.

It is also forbidden to carry any kind of furniture in the lift, which technically means you have to hire a five-story furniture lift whenever you buy a new bookshelf or armchair. We unilaterally decided that this rule didn’t apply to still-in-the-box flat-packed furniture, and proceeded to buy almost everything we needed from Ikea. On one trip, Mark and his father packed the Passat wagon so full that there was barely space left to move the gear lever. The Ikea in Pratteln also sports the globally recognisable ball room, which meant at least some of us (pictured at left) were happy to be out furniture shopping.