The Joy Of Consumerism

When I moved to Virginia from Tucson, I didn’t have much furniture to speak of.
Apart from my dining room table and chairs, I had a bed, which I hated, a coffee table that my dad had found by a dumpster, an end table/lamp combo thing, and a sleeper sofa.
I had bought the sofa for $25 from some friends of my parents who needed to get rid of it. I didn’t much care for it, but for $25 I couldn’t really pass it up, especially when it was a sleeper, and, until my parents went back to Michigan and gave me their bed (with the intention of buying themselves a new one when they returned to Tucson the next year; they also hated that bed), it was all I had to sleep on.
As an aside, shortly after selling me that sofa, my parents’ friends started acting very strange towards them, and eventually they sort of drifted apart. We never knew if the two events were connected, but the timing was odd, and there was no other apparent cause for their weirdness towards my mom and dad.
In any case, while I replaced the despised bed a couple of years ago, the sofa hasn’t gone anywhere and has sort of come to fill the hatred void that was left when I got rid of my old bed.
Why do I hate it? Well, for one thing, it weighs a ton. For another, it’s got this ugly Southwestern-inspired pattern that I don’t much care for. Also, the cushions constantly slide out, and though I’ve thrown a slipcover on it to mask the ugly pattern, it does more slipping than covering.
Apart from a chair that Kathleen dumped on me a while back that I also don’t like and that doesn’t really fit in with the current arrangement in the living room and provides a lousy viewing angle for watching TV, the sofa pretty much provides the only seating.
Not that it really matters, as I seldom have company, and when Scott’s over we just each pick an end.
Still, I hate the sofa, and would like more furniture, so when I saw that the Room Store was offering no payments and no interest until 2010 this weekend I decided to check it out.
I found a set that has the same name as the street I live on, so I took that as a sign.
It was a five-piece set – reclining sofa, reclining loveseat, two end tables, and a cocktail table – but I added a matching recliner. Now I’ll have way more seating than I need, but it’ll look nicer than the rather Spartan design I currently have, and having a recliner will be a plus.
Here’s a blurry cell phone picture of the set:



You can’t really see the end tables, but they basically look like smaller, rounder versions of the cocktail table.
The recliner isn’t in stock, so, because I wanted to get everything delivered at once, it won’t actually be delivered until the 20th.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the old sofa. On the one hand, I hate it, and am inclined to just haul it out to the curb, but on the other, the fact that it’s a sleeper could make it useful in the other guest bedroom. Not that I have guests.
And of course hauling it up the stairs would be a colossal pain in the ass, so I think it’s bound for the curb.
Other than that, I went grocery shopping.
So that was my excitement for the day.