There are some boxes in the attic in the boiler room, there are some in the shed, there is a small wine rack on the wall in the living room, and in the kitchen there are also a number of bottles on top of the cupboards. That should change once we move at the end of the summer, hence my search for a new rack.

The seller, who did not specify the asking price, answers my question about what he wants from it by saying: “Somewhere between 100 euros and 120,000,000 euros.” This doesn’t help me much. Now Marktplaats was the place to negotiate, so I decided to offer 90 euros. He accepts it immediately. So, you always feel like you could have done with less, but we have a deal. When I ask where exactly he lives in Loenen aan de Vecht, he answers that the rack is at his wife’s parents’ house in Driebergen and I can pick it up there.

The shelf is 1 meter wide, 1.20 high and 60 cm deep. “Do you think this will work?” My wife stands next to me as I look into the trunk. A session with a tape measure tells me that when I remove the child seats and lay the rear seats flat, it should fit perfectly.

Once I arrived in Driebergen, my kind father-in-law helped me lift the wine rack into the car. Unfortunately, I didn’t count the two centimeter-wide ledges that the parcel shelf usually rests on. This means that there are two centimeters of space lost in width. We look together from the rack to the car and back again. Unfortunately, this does not shrink the rack, nor does the car grow. We agreed that I would come back the next day in a bigger car and leave for home.