on the great couch shenanigan...

Our pretty, new couches. Like butter.

So, this year, Jay and I decided that it was time to upgrade our couches. The ones we'd had up until this year, as seen here, were seriously thrashed (one was a Salvation Army find that was slightly shredded thanks to the cat we owned for a short time, and the other was found by my husband on the side of the road—no, I AM NOT KIDDING). However, they were both the most comfy couches you'll ever sit on/sleep on/melt into in your entire life, which is probably the reason we were fine keeping them for so many years. I actually wish we had a basement to put them in, because they're perfect "basement couches". Very comfy and best viewed in dim lighting so people don't judge you.

But I digress.

We searched all over for couches and finally decided on a sectional from Big Lots. It was in our price range and absolutely gorgeous. We lounged on it in the store and decided that it was perfection. Dark brown, cozy, a good material for the child who will most likely urp all over it hundreds of times in the next couple years, etc. We made the decision to buy it and placed our order that night, happily looking forward to a beautiful sectional filling the living room of our tiny duplex.

I wish that were the end of my story, but it's not. Let me share a few words of advice:

1. Don't ever buy furniture from Big Lots. They're highly unorganized. And annoying. And will keep telling you your couch will arrive the next weekend for 6 consecutive weeks until you go down to the place in all your pregnant glory and give the manager the stink eye.
   
2. Despite how perfectly you feel a couch (especially a sectional) is going to fit into your place (especially when it is quite small), deciding that measuring it is not really necessary is the actual worst decision you can ever make. Especially when it arrives at your front door and you realize that it is SEVEN FEET LONG ON BOTH SIDES AND YOU BORDERLINE PEE YOUR PANTS.
3. If a tiny old man named Edwin arrives with your sectional on the back of his ridiculously small pickup truck, you should probably offer him a glass of lemonade (and maybe some asprin) along with the standard tip. Even if he accidentally destroys your screen door and spends a good fifteen minutes trying to fix it. Because that man should not be doing any heavy lifting at that age, for the love of all things holy.

Once the delivery man left, I found myself trapped in a living room filled with four couches. (We had yet to get rid of the old ones.) I spent a full twenty minutes trying to talk myself out of the inevitable freak-out, then finally broke down and measured the length of the sectional. After realizing that both sides measured 7 feet long, I wept. And then I moved all the couches around trying to work a miracle. And then I wept some more. And then I moved the couches once more, thinking that even if there was only approximately 1.5 inches of walking space once the sectional was set-up correctly, that we could make it work.

Of course, I soon realized that within a couple months I was going to be so pregnant that I wouldn't even be able to cross from the living room to the kitchen due to the gargantuan couches blocking the entire general area in all their massive glory, which meant no access to my fudge bars, which meant this was not going to work out at all.

When Jay got home he tried everything that I had tried to do, but to no avail. We finally decided to basically separate the sectional and just have one couch along each wall. (Which defeated our original idea of having a sectional to make more space.) Consequently, something that I thought was truly a (very expensive) disaster ended up being just fine. I fought my OCD and realized that our living room came out looking quite lovely:

And we have already decided that the next place we end up getting will be based solely on whether or not this sectional will be able to fit correctly into the living room. Amen.