Our Grand Adventure in NOT Getting a New Couch...

Our couch.... Oh, our couch... It’s done its job for quite some time, but it’s getting progressively more and more horrible... I was never crazy about the light sagey-green color, but it was comfy enough... Until it started to sag. And the cushions lost their comfy smooshiness (it’s a word... I swear.). And the cats decided that the fabric made great scratchy-post-i-ness (also a word) and clawed it down to the wood in places.

I’ve been trying to talk J into getting a new couch, getting this one restuffed and reupholstered, or even just buying those stupid As Seen On TV furniture things to put under the cushions and a slipcover... But none of it has swayed him. He says that he doesn’t want to buy a new couch just to have the cats scratch that one apart too. I tell him that 1. I don’t think they will if we don’t buy one made of a fabric that is just so satisfying to dig their claws into and 2. I CANNOT KEEP SITTING ON THIS STUPID UNCOMFORTABLE COUCH!

I think it was the weekend before last that finally convinced him that it was time... It was a lazy day and we both ended up taking pretty long naps on the couch. And woke up in blinding agony... And then a commercial came on for Living Spaces (if you have one near you and have heard the commercials a million times, you know you just sang it...) all about their “Warehouse Consolidation Sale” with the guy talking with the creepily calm voice... It was all too perfect and J gave in to “if we can find one cheap enough, then we can get a new couch that hopefully the cats won’t claw.” So we made our plan of going and wandering Living Spaces (SING IT!) last Saturday morning after dropping off J’s truck for service.

Saying we were overwhelmed would be a drastic understatement. There are just SO MANY COUCHES! You’d think it would be simple to find a standard sectional without a triangle corner piece that makes it extra huge... But no....... Apparently the trend right now is to have the biggest sofa you can possibly find... Extra large cushions, giant triangle corner piece, a minimum of two recliners, arm rests, cup holders, a chaise, and an ottoman bigger than my dining room table! And as much as I would love a room FULL of sofa... It's just not logical. We looked at and sat on way too many couches... We felt fabric samples and J told me that I absolutely could not get the long-haired faux fur fabric... (Dream killer...)

We narrowed it down to two couches - his pick and mine: 

  Not exactly his couch, but similar enough...

 

My couch... In all its glory...

His was a dark brown leather two seat by two seat sectional with a recliner on each end. I pointed out quickly that if it went in the room the way the couch is now, we would both be sitting on one side of the couch squished together and I would be the only one that would get a recliner because that’s MY seat!

He proceeded to try to create various scenarios to make the couch fit and have both recliners be useful... We even went home for a while so that he could bust out his stuff from architecture classes and make a scale drawing of the room complete with cutouts of the current furniture in the room that he could move around... Because that’s what you do. Obviously.

He then took the drawing back to the store, measured the couch, and created a to-scale cutout of the couch he wanted. Believe me when I tell you that there is NO WAY that this couch was going to fit in our house, have both recliners usable comfortably for tv watching purposes, and not be totally annoyingly in the way somewhere... But he was determined. I am still catching him playing with his little faux room - trying to figure out a way to make it work.

Unfortunately our living is set up in the crappiest way possible with hallway access, an angled wall where the fireplace is (which we NEVER use... Seriously - we blocked it off. That’s how much we don’t use it), kitchen access, and where the front door is... It doesn’t leave many options...

 Vague representation of the room - using nothing but Word..... Pretty much guaranteed not to be to scale...

MY couch? It was so simple. Three seat by two seat dark brown leather sectional in the configuration it would need to be to fit where the current one is... AND it was $6 cheaper than his couch... Just sayin’... The only things? The arm is a bit high, so no more lounging with my arm propped on the arm of the couch... (Who cares?) and the “two” side is technically a chaise, so there is only a cushion on the back for one of the seats and no arm on that end. Now, I didn’t see this as such a big problem because that side would be up against a wall and we could just buy a really pretty comfy pillow to put there and BAM done. But no. J thought it was just too stupid for words that they would want it to be a chaise so badly that they couldn’t just put a back and a cushion for every seat on the couch.

So he immediately wrote mine off... And I did the same to his. So no new couch. After HOURS of looking and sitting and measuring and walking and sitting and lounging and measuring and..... SIGH. Same. Stupid. Green. Torn Up. Uncomfortable. Couch. Ugh.

Now we have to try other places...

All I want is a dark brown sectional!! Preferably made from soft leather!

I’m goin’ on Amazon....... They have everything........