We’ve been living in our house for close to 13 years and we still don’t have, ready for this: a kitchen table. All our friends can’t fanthom why we don’t and how we make do without one.
Easy … we always ate sitting on the sofa while watching TV and the house is quite small the table, we feel, is not a necessity. Besides, it’s just another surface to pile a lot of crap on, right?
And I’m happy to say that we recently got rid of the two orange love seats and replaced them with a real couch, with arm rests and everything. Oh the luxury of it all.
My questions:
What furniture are you missing that is typically considered normal?
What piece of furniture should really go to “the great storage yard in the sky”?
I do not own a bed. I have slept on the floor for about 2 years now–by choice. Just put a few blankets down there and a pillow and I am out like a light. I have lots of room for other stuff now, but I get weird looks from visitors.
I don’t own a dresser. I’ve been storing my clothes on the two bottom shelves of one of the bookcases, but now I need that space for books. (I keep hoping I can hold out 'til I’m a full-fledged TA with an office, but they’re strewn all over the floor and threatening to engulf the TV.)
Can’t think of anything that really needs to go, except perhaps the halogen lamp, which will probably catch fire and kill us all someday.
One of my cats—the evil one—has clawed the living hell out of my sofa. Yes, yes, I was GOING to get the cat declawed, but then she developed a heart condition, just for spite. So the minute the cat dies—before her furry little body is even cold—I am rushing right out and getting a decent sofa.
I don’t have a dresser. I can never find one I like (when I have money for such a big purchase) that does not have cedar-lined drawers. I’m allergic to cedar. Now, our new house has a cabinet in the bathroom big enough to fit all of my clothes that don’t go in the underdresser and closet. So we used the space that could have been used for a dresser to move the futon in our room. Now we have a place to put sick kids or watch TV, fold clothes, veg-out. I like the futon better than a dresser at this point.
We don’t have a couch. We have a loveseat/recliner and big “daddy” chair (as the girls call it). I think we need a couple of occasional or side chairs. You know, those chairs that have upholstered back and seat but are mostly wooden. They would be a place to sit for company without taking up too much space. We are lacking in space in the living room.
What we need to move to the play area in the basement is a hand-me-down recliner.
Here’s tip for anyone whose spouse decides that he needs a big city job so he uproots the whole family from your pretty big house in a small town to a smaller house in the suburbs that costs 1 1/2 times what the big house cost: Just sell all of your furniture that isn’t heirloom. Start over, completely from scratch. You can’t fit the furniture from the bigger house into the smaller house. Anybody need a really long winged-back couch? It seats four skinny people comfortably, I’m told. It’s been in my garage for more than a year now.
We desperately need a proper coffee table for the living room (right now we’re using a trunk). We also have almost 700 books. Do we need bookcases? I fear so.
Someday I’m going to get rid of everything we got at Ikea. Not that I don’t like Ikea, but it’s cheap, that’s all.
But one of the benefits of having a big wedding was all the cash we got. We were able to buy a really good reading chair and a nice dresser.
I started sleeping on the floor about 20
years ago when I had TB. I just couldn’t
breath any other way. I don’t own a bed,
just a pull out couch for visitors.
I also don’t have any back trouble. I
don’t use a pillow either, and don’t have
any wrinkles in my mid-40’s (people think
I’m around 30).
We have a couch from hell, it has sharp edges on it’s arms, that even cut my son when he was five. It is supposedly a sleeper sofa, the only person that would sleep on that thing, most likely lies on needles at the Ripley’s Believe it Or Not Museum too.
Why haven’t we gotten rid of it? It weighs a ton and when we move, * it will still be sitting there * waiting to pierce whoever decides to risk life and limb by sitting on it.