Deconstructing Couch

Or Sofa, as they are regularly called here.  A few loyal followers may recall my adored red couch would not fit through the doorway into our flat.  It has since been living a lonely life in the garage.  Z's really old couch did, however make its way into our living room.  My feelings toward this couch are cool at best.  Generally, it irritates me to sit on, look at, or think about it.  But, it fit in our flat and it served its purpose as a piece of family furniture.  Though I must admit, over the last few months, I did stop bringing out the upholstry cleaner for all the spills that tend to happen around here.  A good rub and the blueberry oatmeal or cranberry applesauce blended right in.  The fabric pattern is forgiving like that.

The Couch (there are usually cushions on it)

But then (no, I am not smiling as I write this.  definitely not.) "sitting" on the couch became more of a "folding into" the couch as you sank low into the cushions and your back curved like a caveman into the abyss of springs.  We found our backs aching and our hips catching with no support.  So Z suggested that maybe it was time to look at replacing the couch.  gasp of joy!

Off to IKEA we went.  Being sure to drop crumbs along the way in the showroom labyrinth lest we not be able to find our way back to the exit. We sat on 2 seat sofas, 3 seat sofas, and armchairs for kicks.  Highbacks, lowbacks, washable, and fluffable.  And C declared, "I like this one because it has a table."

Alas, we decided on a 3 seat highback sofa.  Threw a couple "how can this be so cheap?" items into our cart:  6 wine glasses for £2.29 is such a steal! And it's been annoying only having one wine glass.  No more deciding who gets to drink wine from a real glass and who gets to drink it from a juice glass.  Paid for our items.  And ate some not-so-delicious-but-who-cares-becuase-we-just-made-it-through-3 stories-of-IKEA-madness-food, and are now famished from said journey.  Scheduled sofa delivery for the next day, and drove home.

Now to get the old, oh so old, couch out of our apartment.  How do we do that again?  We couldn't figure out how to get it out of the living room, let alone how to sqeeze it back through the narrow entryway.  So we decided to make it smaller...

I should add that we did try to donate the old couch first, but as it was so worn and does not have the required EU fire tag, it failed the necessary requirements to do so in England.

An extra hand saw is always helpful

The arms eventually came off too.

We broke the couch down into 4 managable pieces, bagged up what we could, and Z carried it out.  It will probably be a couple of trips to the transfer station in our little Honda, but still cheaper (and lighter!) than having to schedule the Borough Council Waste Management to come collect it from the driveway.

The new couch arrived in 3 boxes:

Unwrapping.

Helping Daddy put the new couch together.

A bit of online research, one trip to IKEA, a very cathartic couch deconstruction, and two sweaty delivery guys later, ta da!

The pillows were a little splurge to add some style! :)

Cheers.


On a little side note, we did manage to take a family vacation recently--sorting through the 500+ resulting photos is taking a little time, but there will be a post about our trip soon!