Couch Shopping
In the spirit of 2012 being a happier year, here's a light and fluffy post about shopping for couches. :)
We live in a 1948 ranch house. The best description is that it's like living in a NYC apartment, but with a deck and a yard. We live on one floor, and we have a basement that can never be finished off. The garage "floor" is dirt. Now, the thing about living in an older house is that things that were perfectly acceptable 70 years ago are now a bit of a challenge. Like trying to find furniture. Everyone up here seems to live in gigantimundo McMansions where they need huge pieces to fill up all the empty space. Unfortunately, we can't fit anything like that actually in our house. It makes it tricky at times to find things that work right without taking over the room they get put in. On top of that, life has taught us that our pesky critters leave hair all over our furniture, so we are looking for particular types of fabrics that won't scratch like leather, but will be easy to clean.
Yesterday we swung by Pier 1. I love a number of their fabrics for their chairs and they always have a few smaller types of couches. We weren't wild though about any of the couch choices though--either they were too small, or they were uncomfortable things meant for hallways, or they had really boring fabrics that would make it look like we hadn't changed anything at all. We then swung by a couple of local stores. The first was really pricey--I think the cheapest couch was well over $2400, and considering that we could get a beautiful designer piece from NYC for less than that, it seemed ridiculous to pay that much for fabrics that were no more interesting than the Pier 1 basic choices (plain tan, plain dull green, plain brown, plain white, and not even nice feeling fabrics). The last place we stopped at had one couch we were eyeing--it was a sort of charcoal grey fabric, almost like denim. It didn't completely win us over though. Although you'd think of charcoal as a neutral color that would go with anything, this had a slight tint to it, so it wouldn't play nicely with our other pieces.
We're going to keep looking. At this point, we don't plan on redoing the living room until after we do two other rooms, so we have plenty of time before we'll really want to have something there. I'm not going to just "settle" for a couch I don't like if I don't have to. (Our last couch we got at the Pit at Bob's Discount, so we sorta just took what we could get)
We live in a 1948 ranch house. The best description is that it's like living in a NYC apartment, but with a deck and a yard. We live on one floor, and we have a basement that can never be finished off. The garage "floor" is dirt. Now, the thing about living in an older house is that things that were perfectly acceptable 70 years ago are now a bit of a challenge. Like trying to find furniture. Everyone up here seems to live in gigantimundo McMansions where they need huge pieces to fill up all the empty space. Unfortunately, we can't fit anything like that actually in our house. It makes it tricky at times to find things that work right without taking over the room they get put in. On top of that, life has taught us that our pesky critters leave hair all over our furniture, so we are looking for particular types of fabrics that won't scratch like leather, but will be easy to clean.
Yesterday we swung by Pier 1. I love a number of their fabrics for their chairs and they always have a few smaller types of couches. We weren't wild though about any of the couch choices though--either they were too small, or they were uncomfortable things meant for hallways, or they had really boring fabrics that would make it look like we hadn't changed anything at all. We then swung by a couple of local stores. The first was really pricey--I think the cheapest couch was well over $2400, and considering that we could get a beautiful designer piece from NYC for less than that, it seemed ridiculous to pay that much for fabrics that were no more interesting than the Pier 1 basic choices (plain tan, plain dull green, plain brown, plain white, and not even nice feeling fabrics). The last place we stopped at had one couch we were eyeing--it was a sort of charcoal grey fabric, almost like denim. It didn't completely win us over though. Although you'd think of charcoal as a neutral color that would go with anything, this had a slight tint to it, so it wouldn't play nicely with our other pieces.
We're going to keep looking. At this point, we don't plan on redoing the living room until after we do two other rooms, so we have plenty of time before we'll really want to have something there. I'm not going to just "settle" for a couch I don't like if I don't have to. (Our last couch we got at the Pit at Bob's Discount, so we sorta just took what we could get)