In the four years since first moving out, I’ve always had the attitude that we should ‘make do’ with furniture. Other than buying a brand new wardrobe when we first moved out, almost everything else (bar the TV stand) has been hand-me-downs or second-hand from eBay. This includes our sofas. In four years, we’ve been through four sofas, all of which were second-hand.
Our first sofa was actually a sofa-bed from the spare room of my mothers house when she down-sized. We soon learnt that sofa-beds weren’t designed for day-to-day wear and really should be used as occasional furniture. This happened.
The slats snapped. We lived with it in that state for months – we actually ended up putting a table top ontop of the slats to stop the rest snapping, and we had this sofa until the day we bought our first house. Admittedly, looking back, broken slats would have been really easy to fix…. But hey, we were young.
Our second and third sofas were gifted to us by the lady who owned our first house previous to us buying it from her. Yep, she clearly saw our struggling young-selves unable to afford one. Or maybe what she actually saw was a way to save herself £20 on having them collected and taken away. Either way, we were overjoyed with her offer and accepted happily. They were of course, ugly, dirty and very very old. The lady also owned two dogs, and when we moved in with these sofas it wasn’t too long before Todd (our very dominant male dog) jumped on one of the sofas and marked it as his own. Yep, he peed. We continued to keep the sofa and just removed the damaged seat-cushions. Because that’s the kind of people we are. “We’ll just make do”. Until he peed on it again, and as there was nothing left to remove so we said our farewells. Here’s a pic of the first of two that was destroyed, I spy our make-shift cushion…
A year later after telling the people we work with the woes of our life, lack of a comfy sofa, old lady furniture blah blah, someone we work with offered up their old sofa they needed to get rid of. We paid £40 and welcomed a change. Nothing could be worse than a seat-less old sofa (oh yeah he peed on that remaining sofa too). So we were now on sofa number 4. This sofa was OK. Clean, neutral, meh it was okay. Not to my taste but it was fine. And as it was faux-leather I was able to give it a good old clean and Todd was non-the-wiser (Plus I think they didn’t have a dog, hurrah!) This sofa lasted us until we sold our first house. But then as we moved in with Grants parents for a month before buying this house, we decided that we would re-sell it. Maybe just maybe giving us the push to buy one we liked and wanted.
And here we are, we’ve lived in this house for two weeks. This is our current sofa…
Yep, I’m using those boxes as a kind of sofa-back and the throw on the floor as a seat-cushion. It’s ever so comfy. Honest. You should try it……
Two weeks of sofa-searching, going back and forth between eBay and brand-new. Can I actually justify spending so much money on a sofa? Perhaps we should just continue to make do. No! The time has come. Sometimes you need to just spend money and buy a goddamn sofa!
So I know I mentioned this previously as my dream sofa, well I’m gonna keep dreaming. I really just cannot justify spending that much money – so this was the alternative. I uumed and ahhed about it all week. With no show-room to visit who knows if it’s even comfy? But I’m biting the bullet, taking a risk, spending a small fortune. Brand new sofa, COME AT ME. As they say.
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