All Grownup Like, And Stuff

We don't have a lot of furniture in this house. Part of the reason is practical - the kids destroy it anyway, and lots of furniture is just more stuff that has to be cleaned, which I have enough of already. Part of it is that we always, always have something more important to spend our money on - the cost of a couch can buy a lot of extracurricular activities, or part of an engine. We have an old couch we love - a wood-frame couch from Cargo with cushions that we will just say have seen better days. I fully intend to get new cushions, but we only have the one couch, so we'd have nothing to sit on while the cushions were being made.

A couple of weeks before we left for vacation,BigDaddyFish and I got sick of the fact that there isn't enough room on that wood couch for all 6 of us to sit together, so off we went to go furniture shopping. We went to Wolf Furniture in Frederick and I can't say enough about how awesome they were, about how wonderful Glenda, our saleswoman, was. We sat on eleventy frillion couches, unable to agree forever because BDF is a foot taller than I am and anything he was comfortable on scrunched my neck when I leaned back, and anything that was comfy for me didn't support his arms. Around and around we went, and finally, after at least 3 hours, we found our couch. Glenda helped us buy the couch and an end table and order a reading chair for me - I have always wanted to have my own comfy chair in the back of the room where I can sit and read while the monsters fritter about or watch a movie or bowl on wii or whatever. The chair will be ready in about a hundred weeks, because they had to shear the alpacas to make the wool to weave the fabric or somesuch nonsense, but dammit, if I'm gonna have a chair it's going to have the fabric I wanted on it, not something that looks like it came from the doctor's office waiting room. Glenda was really patient and kind and extremely helpful, even when the whole experience gave me a migraine. The couch, however, we decided to keep the dark brown fabric it came with, and it was delivered two days before we left for vacation.

I used the fact that the new couch was coming to get off my duff and knock off one of the things on my list of 40 things that is only 11 and get the carpets cleaned. This is the part of the post where I turn into a commercial, but no one contributed anything and no one paid me anything, I paid good money for this. I called Stanley Steemer because they said on their annoying commercials that you can book online and when I went to the website they said "Call for SAME DAY service" (emphasis mine) so I called. At 1:45 pm the day before the couch was to be delivered. The very nice girl on the phone told me that a crew could be here between 2 and 6 pm - yes, just 15 minutes after I called. They showed up at 3:30, and were done in less than an hour. How's that for same day service, hmmm? The lovely gentleman that cleaned my carpets sat on a chair as he wrote up the sale and shook his head and said "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I'm not a magician." I laughed and said "Are you kidding?!? This IS magic." And indeed, it was. It was totally worth the 100 bucks I spent.

The couch was delivered the next day, the delivery guy showed up 15 minutes EARLY, easy peasy.

Nemo approves.

He REALLY approves. Next in our quest to be grownups, repainting the walls to get rid of the crayon/marker/pencil/applesauce/bloodstains. Just kidding about the bloodstains. Maybe.

Comments

[hokgardner]

Pretty, pretty.

We only have carpet in one room - our bedroom - and it desperately needs a cleaning. Perhaps I'll call Stanley Steemer.

[De in D.C.]

I have couch envy! We literally have office chairs in our living room (the ones w/ the wood-frame legs & scratchy upholstery in a "not quite navy" blue). I've finally talked Tom into getting something for the living room, but he wants a loveseat, not a couch. You can't lay down on a loveseat! GAH!

Very cool about Stanley Steamer. I did our carpets with one of those Rug Doctors from the grocery store last time, and after exchanging the machine cause it didn't work, plus buying the bottles of cleaner, it took 1 1/2 days and over $40 to do our basement. Totally worth it to pay a bit more and not waste all that time.

[Stacy]

Oh! Love that couch!