Furniture

My wife Susan and I bought our first “real” house together back in 1998, after moving back home to Oklahoma from Spokane, Washington.

(We don’t really count our first house, the $30,000 El Reno Money Pit built in the 1880’s, as a “real” house per se. It predated Oklahoma’s statehood by 25 years, used hay and newspaper for wall insulation, and still had gas lines hanging on the walls that had once been connected to lanterns for indoor lighting. It was a house, but barely.)

Like many young married couples and first time homeowners we suddenly found ourselves with a lot of space and not a lot of furniture. Our initial wave of furniture, a couch and two recliners, came from an elderly couple’s garage sale. After selling their vacation cabin, their excess furniture became our living room set. It was good stuff, too — two amazingly comfortable blue recliners that could lull even the most alert person to sleep in just a few minutes, and a big sleeper sofa that took twelve people to move.

The older I get, the more I have come to not only notice but also accept the differences between men and women. I should have clued in when Susan referred to the furniture as “good enough to get us by until we can afford something else” that the furniture was not going to stay long. I never saw a problem with the furniture, but then again that’s coming from a guy who used to break out “the nice milk crates” for people to sit on when friends visited my first apartment.

Part of staying married is knowing when to smile and say “Yes, dear” to things that don’t always make sense to us. One day after work I came home and my favorite recliners and not-so-favorite couch were gone, replaced by “oversized” furniture. There actually exists a style of furniture called “oversized” — the couch, loveseat and chair each looked like they had been over inflated just a bit. It probably wouldn’t have been so noticeable if our living room had been oversized as well, which it was not. What must’ve looked simply oversized on the show room floor looked absolutely enormous in our living room.

“Do you like it?” Susan asked.

“Yes, dear,” I said, already missing my old recliner.

The new furniture, which was purchased at Factory Direct (which is owned by Mathis Brothers), came with a warranty. That’s a good thing, because the entire set began falling apart almost immediately. It wasn’t long before the over inflated padding became dislodged and fell back down into the couches. The arms of the couch simply felt like a 2×4 underneath a strip of fabric. The chair was the worst; the padding underneath the cushion crumbled, leaving another 2×4 running, from front to back, right through the middle of the seat.

What’s worse, the fabric on the cushions began unraveling. But Susan was not worried, because the fine folks at Factory Direct also sold her a warranty covering rips and tears on the furniture. If the couches or chairs were to be ripped, all we had to do was call them and they would whisk someone (a seamstress, perhaps) out to our home to sew up the damage. Once you could see the stuffing protruding from every pillow and every cushion, we finally called to complain.

The person who arrived was not a seamstress but instead a grumpy old man who informed us that the rips and tears on our cushions were not covered by our rips and tears warranty because they were not caused by accidents, but rather by a manufacturer’s defect. I’m not making this up — had the cushions been cut with scissors (and believe me, I threatened to) they would have been covered, but because they ripped on the seams, they were not covered. He also did nothing about all the stuffing that had gone, well, somewhere. He did nail the wood back into place that was now protruding out of the back of the couch, reattached one of the chair’s wooden feet and sprung some springs or whatever one does to repair springs.

I should mention that at this point we were still making payments on the furniture. At night I dreamt of dragging the furniture back to Factory Direct, lighting it on fire and holding up a big banner warning potential customers about their crappy furniture, but of course I never did. Instead I just bought more pillows and piled them on to my chair so that the wood underneath wouldn’t put my tailbone to sleep every time I sat down.

One day I accidentally burned one of the cushions by putting out a sock that was on fire. Allow me to explain. One day while watching television, my wife said to me, “Do not take your socks off and set them on fire in that candle on the table.” Now I have to tell you, not in a million years would I ever have thought of doing such a thing, but now with the suggestion implanted within my brain I found the urge irresistible to do so! And so when she wasn’t looking I quickly removed my sock and put it in the candle, where it did in fact catch on fire. Now I’m no fire specialist but apparently smelly socks tend to burn very quickly — so quickly that it caught me off guard and I threw the now flaming sock on to the carpet, which I then extinguished (both the sock and the carpet) with a pillow from the couch, leaving a small, black burn mark on the pillow.

Last week, Susan decided she had had enough of the furniture. She set out to replace the furniture with something comfortable yet not too expensive so that when the children inevitably destroy it, no one will be too upset. She settled on a couch and a loveseat that look remarkably like the ones we owned, except smaller, less ripped and of course with no burn marks. Susan’s demands were met: that the new furniture was the same color as the old furniture, and that it absolutely did not come from Factory Direct or any other store owned by Mathis Brothers.

The old furniture was donated to a niece who had just moved out (I didn’t have the heart to sell it to anyone). Boy, you would have thought my kids had discovered a pirate’s treasure on moving day with all the things they found under that furniture. There were parts of toys, about three bucks worth of change, and some Halloween candy that I don’t recall getting this year but maybe a year or two ago all underneath there.

So just in time for Thanksgiving and another thousand dollars later, we have furniture that looks just like the old furniture.

“Don’t you like it so much better?” Susan asked last night.

“Yes, dear,” I replied, still dreaming about that old blue recliner.