I thought designing a house and then organising getting it built on a far away island was going to be the trickiest part of this project but I am beginning to realise I am wrong.
The task of thinking of, and then procuring everything needed to equip and also furnish such a house in the tropics and putting these things together to ship them is vastly more difficult.
Some of the things for our new house we already have from our previous house and these things are currently in storage ready to ship …but it has been six months since we last saw them and we don’t remember a lot of what we lovingly packed up at that time.
But due to the limited availability of many things where we intend to live and the somewhat limited choice of many goods on Carriacou we need to ship virtually everything we are going to need. Trying to think of everything you might need is very challenging, except of course that we need to equip not just one residence but both our new house and also the adjoining holiday flat. And all the things we decide to purchase need to ‘hang together’ with a coordinated look, style, flair and practicality that befits the quality of accommodation we are trying to achieve and appeal to the guests we are hoping to attract.
But we won’t know if all the things we are purchasing will hang together or even fit into the rooms they are destined to occupy until we get them on to site a few months from now after shipping them 4000 miles.
Additionally, we don’t know how much we can safely afford to spend on all this ‘gear’ because until we ship it we won’t accurately know the cost of getting it to Carriacou or the import duty the authorities will try and extract from us.
So in light of the enormity of this task I’m trying to be very Caribbean about everything and just convince myself it will all happen in the end …somehow.