Growing Up

We are blessed to live in a lovely home.  My dream home, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place so nice.  Our house was built in 1900 and it has the details of a home built at that time.  However, it has more closet space than most homes I’ve seen from that time, which makes me even happier.

However, our house is old.  Obviously.  It doesn’t need a lot of work, as in it’s unlivable.  It’s just that it needs a lot more work than a new house.  There’s always something going on.  We’re trying to get through each room of the house one by one.  However, our project doesn’t just include tearing down wallpaper and adding shelves.

Besides working on our house, we’re trying to work on the things inside our house too.  As in furniture.  Right now, every last piece of furniture in our house comes from either a friend’s house, garage, or attic, or from a garage sale or craigslist.  I would really like to go out and get some grown up furniture, and get rid of some of the pieces that Knut and I got dumpster diving in college.

For the past 2 years, Knut and I have put away a little, tiny sum every month towards a new living room set.  It’s the room that is closest to being finished with the fireplace Knut installed.  After looking at some couches when we were saving, we realized our taste was more expensive that I thought, and when our 2 year savings plan had matured, we may only be able to afford a couch and not a whole room set.

We reached our savings goal in December, and waited until this month to pick one out, because I’ve read that the best furniture sales are in January.  Plus, we were pretty busy in December!  You know, new baby and all!

We went to several stores this last weekend, and found the perfect sofa in our price range at the second store.  We were both in love with it.  Since we had several more stores to go, we took the saleswoman’s card, and moved on, though convinced that we had found the one.

After going to several more stores and not finding anything we liked even close to the other one, Knut talked me into going into just one more store.  Wouldn’t you know, we found another sofa we liked.  Still great quality, although half the price of the previous one we had looked at.  With that price, Knut could get a leather chair to go in the living room that he was gawking at in one of the other stores.

We measured so carefully because our antique house has little doorways.  I measured the doorway into the living room before we left, and found it to be 33″ wide and just a hair over 77″tall.  The half-the-price sofa was exactly 33″ at the smallest point with legs removed and pillows squished, and for some reason, Knut didn’t trust my measurements.  Since it was so close, and so tight, Knut wanted to go home and measure the doorway for himself before we ordered it.  I picked out fabric for it and the pillows.  I wanted a red sofa.  Bold, I know, but I’ve always wanted one, and I think it would be perfect for this room.  If we’re buying a brand spankin’ new piece of furniture, I wanted it to be exactly what we wanted.  No compromising.

So after taking down every measurement of the sofa, and the fabric swatch numbers, we headed back to the store with the leather chair and bought it, although it was back ordered and it will be ready when the couch was at the other store.  It was so perfect.

When we got home, Knut went right to measuring the doorway.  I was right.  33″.  However, he then looked around and measured the other doors in the house.  The doorway to the front door, back door, porch door.  The biggest doorway into the house was only 29″.  We realized we had small doors when my parents gave us their old sofa.  They drove it all the way up from Arizona, and when they got it here we realized that we never measured and it was seriously a miracle that the thing got into the house.  It only fit through the doorway into the den, which was fortunate because that’s where we planned for it to go.

Knut measured the height of the doorway.  He got 78″ inches from it.  He then looked at the measurements of the sofa and saw it was 80″ long.  It couldn’t go through upright either.  As we both stomped and fumed around the house, we then both sulked that we had spent a whole day furniture shopping, picked out the perfect sofa and even put money down on a leather chair, and we’d have to go back and start from scratch.  Not only a whole day wasted, but we wouldn’t be able to figure out babysitting, and time off and all those other stars that need to align for Knut and I to go shopping together.

The next day, Knut called his friend in the “big city” where we went furniture shopping and asked if he could run by the store for us and measure the sofa one more time and try to see if there was any possible way to get it into our house.  Since we were ordering it with a special color, it would be unreturnable, so we had to be sure.  As Knut was on the phone with his friend, he did a double check of the measurements he had taken in the store.  When he got off the phone, he told me that the first sofa we liked was 80″ long.  He was looking at the wrong set of measurements.  The one we were going to get in the end he had marked as only 76″ long.  Plenty of room for it to go through the doorway upright.  I was so excited I cannot even tell you.

He wanted to have his friend double check that it would work, but at the end of today, we get to call in the order.  I’m so excited.  It’s funny.  I’ve graduated from college, paid off that college debt, gotten married, had 4 children, am living in the second house that we have owned, have been called “ma’am” more times than I can count at the grocery store and somehow, buying a little couch makes me finally feel like a grown up.