Saturday, January 05, 2008

Furniture Follies

There will be no deep and meaningful post tonight, I'm afraid. Today was too frustrating. Back in September, Hubby and I ordered some new living room furniture- a sofa and two chairs. The sofa arrived after Thanksgiving, delayed by almost four weeks due to a problem with the fabric we had initially chosen (they stopped making it). We had moved our old "sofa", which is a futon, into our guest room for the in-laws to sleep on during their visit, so we sat on lawn chairs at Thanksgiving. Luckily, no one in our family is particularly formal. The new chairs were supposed to arrive around Christmas time. We were broken in by the experience with the sofa, and so weren't surprised when they actually came in this week. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the fabric on them, too. It was completely wrong. We had order brick red chairs and we received mottled beige chairs. Needless to say, we were not pleased.

Hubby had borrowed a friend's small SUV to bring the chairs home (in the biggest rainstorm San Diego has seen in quite sometime- it actually rained all day). After several phone calls with the shop, much conferring and fuming, and a not very successful attempt to just take a Zen attitude toward the whole thing, we have agreed to take some loaner chairs until our chairs come in again, which will be in 8-10 weeks, since they are coming by boat from Italy. They offered to let us keep the beige things while we waited, but we declined. I am sure they would look nice in someone's living room, but they would look horrible in ours. So some red leather chairs will be delivered to us tomorrow.

If you are reading this and do not know us well, you are probably wondering (1) why we didn't just get our money back and go buy some other chairs, (2) why we were willing to wait more than three months for chairs in the first place, and (3) why new parents are importing chairs from Italy. The answer to all of these questions is that my taste and Hubby's taste intersects at expensive European (although the sofa was actually expensive modern American). Either one of us alone can find items we like at Ikea. Together, we can only agree that the Billy is a reasonable bookshelf. Our second favorite chairs from our furniture shopping back in September are actually $200 more per chair and would probably also have to come by boat from Europe. I have resigned myself to extended searches for furniture, and to paying more than is strictly necessary for what we eventually buy. On the bright side, it is all of excellent quality. Everything is microfiber, to help it survive the inevitable abuse from Pumpkin.

While I'm talking about furniture, I have to share one of our success stories: we shopped very hard for the perfect post-baby coffee table to replace the six moving boxes covered with a bath towel that we'd been using since moving into our new house in September. By the time we started the search, Pumpkin was pulling herself up on the boxes with regularity, and clearly loving it. Therefore, one of the requirements for the coffee table was that watching Pumpkin pull herself up on it must not cause me to make that Mommy-gasp sound I make when she does something that scares me. We decided that ottomans were the way to go, but Hubby just didn't like any of the standard oblong ottomans we found. We ended up with three very funky ottoman/bench thingys. They only took four weeks to arrive, which seemed almost like instant gratification to us. Pumpkin was thrilled with our choice, especially once she discovered that we'd actually bought her a tunnel.



As you can see in this second photo, they also make excellent TV guards.


And yes, our TV guard cost more than the TV.

2 comments:

  1. First, I love the pic of pumpkin starting in the tunnel! That's so cute!

    Second, my hubby and I are the same way about furniture. We have completely different tastes in almost everything decorating-wise, until you get to the super nice and expensive stuff. And that's why we still have crappy, hand-me-down furniture in our living room. Good luck with your furniture!

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  2. I'm convinced that if Hubby and I had met during our starving students days, we'd never have lasted. We would have broken up during our first furniture shopping expedition!

    We have a lot of crappy stuff left from my student days. We're buying new stuff very slowly, because each new piece costs so much.

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