Category Archives: Tom

As you know, we no longer have an official guest room now that Katie is taking up the third bedroom. So, when we have overnight guests, they get the upstairs living room pullout sofa. It’s a queen—and we now have a topper—but otherwise, that’s all the sleeping space unless you wanted a plain ol’ couch. But, we rarely need more room than that. BUT, we kinda wanted to be prepared anyway.

So in the meantime, the peanut gallery (you know who you are!) has let us know that the downstairs couch was just a bit too—shall we say—plush (or comfortable!) and was a bit hard to get out of…

And then every now and again when we sat down or moved around, we’d hear something creaking. Or snapping. Or groaning. Or ripping. And then we started thinking about just how long we’ve had the couch and chair set…and came to realize it’s about eight years old! EIGHT! HOLY WAH! It certainly doesn’t seem like that long. The set is still good/comfy but is obviously breaking down…and we feel like we want to sell it as a set while it still has life.

SOOOOO…considering all of the above things, we decided that selling the set would allow us to actually scale back the furniture we currently have (by only replacing the couch and NOT the chair since we have the big leather chair that’s really out-of-place in the playroom). We thought it could be cheap—but should be comfortable since we use that couch on a daily basis. But not anything of great quality since we still have a lot of baby and kid messy stages to go through.

We bookmarked some on Amazon but I refused to buy something like that without testing seating comfort. Sam’s Club had a similar one but refused to take it down for us to try (they told us to just return it if we didn’t like it—REALLY?!). Costco was hit or miss…and again, I would hesitate ordering without testing it and they never have the same one in the stores as they do online (and if we found one in the store, how the hell would we get it home?).

And then we broke down and went to our favorite (dangerous) furniture store…and the same guy who we bought ALL of our past furniture from was still there—and remembered us! And 30 minutes and $1100 later we have a new leather sleeper couch. (It’s amazing how a moderately inexpensive $799 couch jumps up to $1100 after 5 year warranty, taxes, and delivery are added on.) But it’s a nicer quality couch than we planned on (plus it’s leather) that will last longer than we planned on. And we’ve used the warranty before on a different piece of furniture so for that extra $100 it was worth it. It should actually last quite a long time—it’s better quality than the stuff we’re replacing…so the high quality new couch should easily last that long or longer.

Owen liked this couch:

Waiting for us to do the paperwork:

Watching them bring in the couch:

REALLY enjoying the new couch:

The bonus is that the couch is a bit smaller—plus we moved Owen’s drawing table to the playroom—so the room feels quite a bit bigger. Owen AND Katie were having a blast in all the open space…but I wonder when Owen will realize his once-in-awhile eat-in-front-of-the-TV table and chairs are gone…

So now, we have room for more guests! Come on down!!