{"id":13478,"date":"2018-03-20T17:04:26","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T17:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=13478"},"modified":"2018-03-20T17:10:25","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T17:10:25","slug":"good-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/good-fortune\/","title":{"rendered":"Good fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the pleasures I derive from living in rural France is seeking out and buying old furniture for my house. I’d been thinking for a while that I needed a low table to go in the seating area of my ‘salon’ and started looking on Le Bon Coin about two weeks or so ago to see what I could find.<\/p>\n

One of the problems I’ve found is that whatever I’m looking for, there’s never anything suitable for sale in the Dordogne, or even in the surrounding area, and I always end up having to drive for miles to buy it. And in south-west France that usually means that the journey there and back takes about twice as long as it would do in the UK because of the kind of roads that you have to drive on.<\/p>\n

And so it was with my table. Dozens of low tables are listed every day on Le Bon Coin but the great majority are not what I decided that I wanted, which was something in solid oak with no open shelves to catch dust and at least one drawer for some storage.<\/p>\n

I spotted one that was ideal and at only 90\u20ac but it was way down south in the Haute Garonne, a journey there and back of some 640 kms (400 miles). That would have added a fuel cost of around 94\u20ac to the deal, which didn’t seem to me to be worth it.<\/p>\n

And then, a few days ago, I spotted the same table but this time in the Lot et Garonne, a distance of only 256 kms there and back (160 miles), making it a much more viable proposition. However, the seller had listed it this time for 130\u20ac and I anticipated that when I went to see it yesterday I’d have some hard bargaining to do.<\/p>\n

Well, I did and I didn’t. When I arrived at the seller’s home at about 6.00 pm he took me out to the adjoining garage to show me the table and immediately tried to impress me with how good a condition it was in. But it wasn’t.<\/p>\n

I pointed out a couple of scratches on its surface that he had somehow omitted to mention in his advertisement and said that as it needed quite a bit of work to get it into shape, the maximum that I’d be willing to pay was 100\u20ac. He said that it only<\/em> needed to be rubbed down and blah blah blah… something similar to what French sellers always seem to say whenever you start to haggle with them. I always think every time, well, why didn’t you do it then before you put it up for sale, and then I just hold my ground.<\/p>\n

I insisted that the maximum I’d be prepared to pay was 100\u20ac and he suggested, what about 110\u20ac? I said that no, I wouldn’t pay more than 100\u20ac, knowing that he’d had the table up for sale for at least 10 days or so. But I didn’t force him and I gave him the chance to say that it wasn’t enough, but instead he reluctantly agreed and I came away with my table.<\/p>\n

This morning I spent about half an hour rubbing the top down to reduce the scratches and then applied teak oil to it, which still smells lovely as I type this. I was very pleased with the results and although I originally intended to rub it down a bit more, I probably won’t as I think that an old table needs a few marks on it.<\/p>\n

See from the following shots if you agree.<\/p>\n

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For now I’ll just buy some more teak oil as I ran out of the small bottle of Topps that I’d brought with me from the UK, and give it an application every day to see how it looks after a week or so. But I’m very happy with my purchase and think that the 2\u00bc hour journey each way to get it was well worth it, helped by a little bit of good fortune when it came to doing the deal \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the pleasures I derive from living in rural France is seeking out and buying old furniture for my house. I’d been thinking for a while that I needed a low table to go in the seating area of my ‘salon’ and started looking on Le Bon Coin about two weeks or so ago … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13478"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13493,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13478\/revisions\/13493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}