Couch Crazy

They say the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, right? Okay, in that case, here goes...

I am addicted to couches.

There. Whew. It felt good to get that off my chest. In the past year Mom and I have moved no fewer than SEVEN couches, which means I should probably look for a twelve-step program really soon.

See, I kind of have a problem with collecting couches. It started innocently enough. When we lived in Smyrna we had an off-white matching couch and love seat downstairs in the living room, which we covered with chocolate brown slipcovers after realizing that people with small boys and black cats should NOT have off-white couches. We had a gray matching couch, love seat, and chair in the bonus room upstairs because the color theme in that room was red and black with gray. No problems, right?

Well, when we were in the process of buying our Hendy home, I knew we'd need a bit more furniture because we'd have an additional room (a den) here. I didn't want to break up our matched sets, so I bought an extra couch at a yard sale for $10 and Mom and I hauled it home in her Suburban. Since we didn't have the house yet but we'd already moved out of our other one, I stored it on Mom and Dad's patio for a couple of weeks, much to my dad's chagrin.

So a few weeks later we moved into the house and discovered that the new $10 couch was too big for the den. We switched it with the off-white-slipcovered-in-brown love seat from the living room, then bought another similar but not totally matchy brown slipcover for the $10 couch.

All was quiet on the couch front for a few months.

Then Mom and I worked a Humane Society yard sale where I fell in love with a brownish leather love seat. So, that time we borrowed PawPaw's truck, hauled the love seat to my living room, and moved the $10 couch downstairs to replace the gray couch that was beginning to show the strain of being occupied by an eighty-pound lab every day. We bought a black slipcover so it would match the music room (a.k.a. "Man Cave") theme. Then we hauled the gray couch to Mom's and dumped it at the top of her street for the trash men to take away.

Digression: Have I mentioned that the trash collectors hate me? Well, they do. I don't know what I ever did to them, but they will not haul away anything I leave at the curb. My neighbors can leave all manner of household refuse at their curbs and it gets picked up that day. I, on the other hand, have had a rusty old planter and an ancient chandelier sitting by the street for two weeks and no one in the sanitation profession has even glanced at it. Grrr...

Anyway, so I've been fairly disciplined with my upholstered furniture purchases for a few months. Then last week we found a free couch and love seat that had seen better days, but we thought it would be okay for my brother. See, he's taken out his own trash by kicking his wife out of the house. (Sorry, I'll retract my claws now, but she totally deserves that comment.) Since she'll be taking some furniture with her if she ever finally picks up her crap from his house (sorry, claws again, gotta work on that), we thought he could use them. Once we got it to his house (with the use of PawPaw's truck again), we realized it was in worse shape than we'd originally thought. Now it's waiting to be carted off to Goodwill.

So today Mom and I were out yard saling again (of course, because it's Saturday. Duh!) and we found a sleeper sofa that I could afford. I've been looking for one so that when my in-laws come to stay we can offer an alternative bedding option (other than the Aerobed, which is losing air through a slow leak so that our guests end up flat on the floor by morning--because we're givers, you see), but they were all either too expensive or in really bad shape. The sleeper sofa is a woven kind of rust and brown combination that would be really pretty if it weren't unraveled in a couple (okay, several) places, but it'll look great with a slipcover on it. And I just happen to have a couple of those lying around. Ha!

So, you guessed it, we borrowed a truck (this time my brother's) and brought home the sleeper sofa, then hauled the old $10 couch to Goodwill (because the couch I'd been sitting on for months was not good enough for my brother to put in his garage TV room). What a couch snob!

I washed all the covers that would unzip in the washing machine, then shampooed and vacuumed the parts that aren't removable, and sprayed antimicrobial Febreeze over all the cushions. Now I have a new (to me) sleeper sofa.

So there you have it. Seven couches moved in less than 16 months. There's probably a cure for this sickness, but I don't want to know. I don't suffer from my insanity--I enjoy every minute of it.

And don't even talk to me about shoes. Just don't.