Oldest piece is a dining room set purchased from The Bombay Company in 1998. It’s in the finished basement and until a few years ago served as a work/play area for my daughter and her friends and also the kids table at Thanksgiving and Lunar New Year dinner.
Newest piece is a sectional in the living room. Bought from Ethan Allen for a price that would have made1998 (future) Mrs Mouse wince.
We are about to buy a set of three counter stools each of which will cost considerably more than all three of the ones we currently have did 14 years ago. From a new company called Wayfair.
I used to move around so much it never really made sense to buy real furniture. It was all from Craigslist and thrift stores well into my 30s.
Then I met and moved in with my partner, and started accumulating a bit after that. A Costco power recliner that we like a lot (it IS slow, though). A firm-ish mattress with real metal springs (Titan Plus Core) that’s way more supportive for our fat asses than the cheap memory foam stuff.
Still don’t have a proper dresser or dining table though. My 3d printer in the garage has a nicer workbench than any table in the house. In my dream of dreams, if I ever win the lottery, I’m going to set aside a whole room for a custom board game table, with a removable cover and cupholders and player trays and all that jazz. That’s the DINK life, I guess. Our house is mostly just a scattered collection of hobby workstations.
In 1981 we bought a kitchen table for our apartment in Princeton, which we are still using.
In 1990 or so we bought a big table for the sun room we had build for our house, it is in our dining room, only used for dinner when we have the kids for Christmas. It is now storing our onions from the garden.
We have bought a bed or two. We’re expecting a new sectional sofa this Saturday, to replace the one we bought 20 years ago, with a spring poking my wife when she sits.
Most of our stuff is inherited from my in-laws, like my desk and a bunch of antique tables and a corner cupboard. And my wife’s desk was bought for almost nothing from the sale of discontinued furniture that my work had. Weighs a ton, but it is big and cost like $10.
When I moved into my first apartment in NYC, in 1980, I bought a dresser and captains bed - a platform bed with under bed storage - from Gothic Cabinet Craft.
It was sturdy and well-constructed, I still had the dresser when I retired and moved in 2019 (although it was the dresser I used for storage inside my closet.
I moved into a more spacious apartment in 1985 and upgraded to a regular platform bed. The captain’s bed was a two piece construction and I used it as two daybeds for a while, then I got a real sofa and discarded it.
Hubby reminded me that I bought a Papasan chair (from Pier One Imports, of course) when I was in college. I had it in my dorm room but then let future hubby have it for his apartment. We had it for about a decade.
The first pieces of new furniture that my wife and I purchased were a solid wood bed fame, a couch, and a refrigerator. That was in the fall of 2001 or spring of 2002. We still have the bed frame (it has a integrated headboard and footboard). It’s ugly and doesn’t really fit in with our current design aesthetic but it’s still in good shape and there’s no good reason to replace it.
The fridge we gave away when we moved into a rental that had a fridge supplied with it, and the couch… hell if I know. I honestly don’t remember what happened to it. We must have given it to someone at some point.
Our most recent furniture acquisition was this spring. Our son built us some bespoke bookcases for our living room and they look so nice we decided it was time to replace our aging chairs and beat-up couch to help match the new vibe. We got a new couch and two chairs, all more-or-less matching. I’m not too happy with the chair – I swear it’s a different model than the one I test-sat in the store and this one isn’t very comfortable – but I’m too cheap to replace a not-even-a-year-old recliner.
When we moved into our first apartment in 1964 we bought a king-size bed: frame, box spring and mattress. The mattress has been replaced a couple but we still have the frame (with attached bookshelf headboard and box spring. In 1970 we spent a year in an unfurnished apartment in Switzerland and bought a dining room set as well as a couch from Moebel Pfister across the Limatt from the Landesmuseum in Zuerich. We had those pieces shipped back at the end of the year. We finally abandoned the couch when we sold our house 7 years, but we still have and use the dining room set (table and six chairs). We had the chairs reupholstered maybe 30 years but otherwise they are the same as what we bought. Some years ago, we bought two couches, but we have given one away, although we still have one. Maybe ten years ago I replaced my La-Z-Boy with a Danish modern chair that has a built-in laptop table that I am using now. And a year ago, my son bought my wife a motorized chair that goes from lifting her to a standing position to nearly lying down.
A This End Up couch, purchased in the mid eighties, is by far the oldest still living piece of furniture in my house. True, it is on its second or third set of cushions, but the frame is the same and it’s been invaluable over the years. Most of the furniture in the house was not purchased new; this one’s been a bargain. (I’m sitting on it right now …)