appliances issue resolved
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Mari had the movers come in to do an estimate today. They're the same people who Mari hired to move my handful of stuff from home #25 to here. Mari asked about whether they could help us with the price of shipping appliances from the "recycle shops"; they quoted a very low price that would enable us to in fact make those purchases.
So we corralled the kids and got down to the recycle shop that Mari had previously visited. We bought both a washing machine/dryer all-in-wonder (here's hoping it works out) and a fridge. They seemed to like our kids, who were on their best behavior as it was Mari's birthday. They told us, "If you write a review on Google Maps, we'll give you a ten percent discount." So Mari did that. I'll reuse part of this write-up for my English-language review.
We liked the place because they had family-sized appliances as opposed to most "recycle shops" which have apartment sized clutter (bar fridges and dismal little incompetent washing machines). When you walk in you're greeted by bright chandeliers hanging from rafters that support surf boards. There were old cameras and old kettles and old sofas and some jewelry. It's in a hipster neighborhood, just a couple of doors down from a gluten-free bakery.
Anyway, we applied our 10% discount to some random stuff that we wanted. I found a nice cutting board for about 1/3 of its new price; I couldn't see any sign that it had been used. Mari found a bathroom scale. The Girl found a pink fedora-like hat with cat ears.
And I found a quartet of old Dell office desktops. Three were i5's, but one was an i7. For 15,000 yen it looked too good to be true. I asked them if I could open it up, and the fellow handed me a screwdriver. Inside I found a very clean system with a discrete video system. A bit of Googling told me that it was a ten year old system and well regarded among the scavenger/rebuild crew on Youtube. It would make a decent system for The Girl and me to edit photos with a total spend of about $300. E.g. I would replace the ancient RAM chips and HDD and discard the optical drive, and already had a modern BR-D burner.