Have a Seat

No seriously. This is a really long ridiculous story, but the world needs to know it. You might want to be sitting down for this.

A million years ago the husband and I found ourselves in possession this couch:

Actually it was a couch AND a love seat combo. A practically brand new set that we snagged for $200 total. Honestly, it was a great deal. And it was a great couch. For a bunch of broke college kids. The husband and I had many great years with this couch. It moved a total of six times. Usually in the back of the husband's Jeep.

But after eight years with us, the couch had seen better days. The frame was broken, there were stains on the cushions and I can't even count the number of people who have slept/gotten sick/had sex on that couch (hey, we had some wild parties back in the day... what can I say?). So it was time to part with our party couch and get ourselves a real adult couch.

Easier said than done.


The husband decided he wanted a sectional. I was not on board with this idea. I didn't think that we could find one that fit in our current living room and I also knew that this wasn't a permanent place for us. We're looking to buy a home in the next two years and sectionals are such finicky pieces of furniture. What if it wouldn't flow in our future home?

We went back and forth on what to do, visiting furniture stores to get some ideas. We started at Ashley Furniture and La-Z-Boy, where we found nothing we liked. We went to Ethan Allen, where we found nothing we could afford. We went to a local furniture store called Tyndall's where again we found nothing we liked.

Then we went to Bassett Furniture and fell for the HGTV Home Design Studio custom furniture couches and sectionals. But we were easily looking at a $4,000 purchase. We realized that whether we decided to go with a couch or a sectional, this was going to cost us a lot more than we had bargained for.

We regrouped. Maybe it was a better idea to buy something cheap for this apartment and then upgrade to something better when we were settled in an actual home? So we went to a furniture outlet and we went to Value City Furniture where we found a small sectional for around $800. It wasn't sturdy and it wasn't super comfortable, but it would get us through the next few years. And if we were lucky we could sell it to some broke college kids for a couple hundred bucks.

And just as we were about to pull the trigger, the husband changed everything. He suggested we try one more store - Tyndall's larger showroom in South Carolina. I was skeptical, but went along for the ride. And that's when we found it. A decently priced sectional that checked all of the boxes off of our list.

And so we started the process. We did a little bargaining to try and lower the price, we looked into financing, we started picking out fabric, we made sure that it would actually fit in our living room... Oh, wait. While I was happily flipping through patterns and solids, microfibers and cottons,  the husband stopped me.

"I don't think it's going to fit."

"...What?"

"What were the dimensions in our living room again?"

He was right. It wasn't going to fit. By mere inches. I actually almost started crying right there in the showroom. After weeks of traipsing through furniture stores, sitting on every god damn couch in existence, arguing over whether a couch/loveseat combo or sectional would be better, deciding how much to spend (or not spend), and looking at fabrics and cushion firmness and rolled arms, I was done. I couldn't do it anymore.

We explained the problem to our couch sales dude and at that very moment, the furniture gods took pity on us. The glorious part of a sectional is that it comes in sections. Brilliant, right?! I know, and I went to college and everything! Our problem was the corner piece. The sectional we ordered had one of those oversized corner pieces, which was actually why I fell in love with it in the first place.

With a regular sectional you get this dumb corner piece that no one can actually sit on because there's no room for your legs/feet. It's wasted space that makes me irrationally angry.

Image via Viesso

With an oversized corner piece, there's room (okay, not a lot of room, but still room) for a normal human to sit.

Image via Bassett

So! When our furniture sales dude guy told us we could swap the oversized piece for a smaller corner piece, I think the husband actually wanted to bend over and kiss his feet. And even though I didn't want that dumb corner piece, I couldn't crush that kind of excitement so I agreed to the swap. And that's the story. It's not perfect, but I told the husband that when we move to a house that has a normal sized living room we are replacing that corner piece. We'll keep it of course. It will just be a lone, weird-ass chair that the husband will have to sit in at all times as a reminder of the pain and suffering he caused me by wanting a sectional and not a god damn couch/love seat combo.

PS. I would love to show you pictures of our new, awesome couch, but it is literally the only sectional that Tyndall's does not show on their website (of course) and it's not here yet. They told us it would arrive in eight weeks, but it's been eight weeks and three days (yes, I'm counting) and no word from the furniture store. If we don't hear from them by Friday we will be staging a protest outside their showroom until they give us what we want.