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| A seat for every occasion |
What an amazing day. We wanted to do a reconnoitre of the big home-stores on the southern outskirts of Perpignan to have an idea of what was there for next year. Wow! We started with a couple of homeware shops, a lighting shop, and a furniture shop. Next was the monster Castorama, a huge store which make a Mitre 10 Mega look like a corner hardware store. It was immense, and the range on offer was outstanding. You don’t get 3 toilets to choose from, you get 30. Same for showers, vanities, basins and so on. There are entire styles of them that we don’t get in New Zealand. It was great fun looking at everything, and we could have spent hours there making choices. It is such a waste that we are heading back to New Zealand before we can do anything. We would so like to get stuck in.
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| Unbelievable price - includes all the appliances |
The kitchens looked good – that will be our biggest expense – or so we thought. As we left the store we noticed a display of pre-made kitchens. They were 2.5 or 3.0 metres long, complete with integrated fridge/freezer, oven, rangehood, cooktop, and maybe even a dishwasher. One with all of these, upper and lower cupboards and the plumbing and power all ready to connect was the paltry sum of €1400 COMPLETE, including all the appliances. Unbelievable! We had budgeted NZ$10,000, plus appliances, and this store was doing the lot for under NZ$3000. We were stunned. It wasn’t even a cheap bit of customwood, but a professional-looking kitchen with soft-close drawers and cupboards and a good quality gloss finish. The accessories were well-priced too – for example 6 kitchen tool hooks for a couple of euros, when I know in NZ they are many dollars each.
The furniture stores were good too, though closer to NZ prices, but still significantly below. There is an awful lot of stuff we will have to get when we arrive – we hope we can rent a Postman Pat van or similar when we arrive next year so we can shift it around.
