Category Archives: Shops, Shopping and Services

To the shops!

 Posted by Mark on Sunday, 9 November 2014

 

Saturday – After a good nights sleep we awoke early to the most glorious sunrise streaming in over the hills through the hallway windows. After an hour of what was becoming our new career, that of unpacking cardboard boxes, we decided to head into the main town of Kirkwall to buy some much needed storage furniture and various other items.

The most important item would be a new cooker. We knew from the vendor that it was ‘broken’ but when the oven door fell off the first time Anna opened it and all the writing on the controls had been ‘cleaned’ off probably with a Brillo pad, we both decided that its time was limited. At first we considered just buying a second hand cooker as it would be replaced when the new kitchen was built. But our dear friend Christine, suggested buying a decent new one as Anna loves cooking so much and then at a later date this could be put into the Grain Store when that was converted to a holiday let.

We had no real ideal which shops would be best for such things as cookers and wardrobes are not the sort of things you go looking for when on holiday! We started on the industrial estate as that closed at lunchtime on a Saturday and then continued into the town where we visited most of the likely shops. Everyone was helpful and we also bumped into a couple of the locals we knew.

By about 3 pm we had managed to buy a wardrobe for the spare room, a couple of cabinets for the bathroom, a second -hand G-Plan display/ storage cabinet for the kitchen, and induction hub cooker and several other items, although the selection of all these items was more limited than ‘ down south’ it was still varied enough to give us a choice and we both agreed that we would probably have spent several days visiting several towns before making our choices, whereas up here the whole task included a nice lunch was completed in a few hours, bliss!

We headed home and continued a bit more unpacking and then decided to get some coal and provisions from the local store at Isbister, about a mile from here. This is an interesting stores, selling a bit of almost everything. Whilst we are deciding on our purchases we got talking to several of the locals about the process of moving in. We were mentioning the fun and games we had when on the day of the move our drains got blocked as the cess pit was overfull after the two days of heavy rain that they had here prior to us arriving. One chap who was buying vital weekend provisions of fermented products, announced that ‘drains is what I do’. His name was Marcus and is mother-in-law was our next door neighbour who we hadn’t met yet. we agreed for him to pop over tomorrow to take a look. Our provisions purchased and coal bought we heading back home feeling very satisfied and a busy yet productive day done.