Surprise - the furniture is ready

It was Friday, my catch-up day at work, and I'm thinking about the fact that we didn't hear from the furniture store about the furniture we ordered. We bought it at a very reasonably priced furniture store up at the beach. Although not so convenient for delivery, the price was right AND there is no sales tax in DE. They had said 2-3 weeks, but thought it might be 2 weeks. I was hoping it would be 2 weeks, as we'd be able to pick it up right away. If it were going to be ready in 3 weeks, we'd have to wait another week after that, as we already had plans to be out of town the 3rd weekend.

So since it appeared we weren't going to be tied up with the furniture, I emailed our friends Liz & Robert, with whom we had 'back-up' plans for dinner on Sat, in case the furniture wasn't ready. But Liz & Robert decided to go to Williamsburg for the weekend. They invited us to go, but we really have no interest in visiting Williamsburg so we politely declined. Besides, we didn't have any arrangements for our dog.

So then I began trolling my friends via email to see who was doing what this weekend. Since Halloween is on Mon, I figured some of our friends may want to go downtown on Sat night to the clubs and bars and see all the boys in their costumes. But everyone I contacted either had other plans or didn't respond to my email.

I began to think 'Man, we really are losers. Here it is, Halloween weekend, and we have absolutely NO plans what-so-ever.' So I called Joe and asked him how he felt about just going downtown the two of us and checking out the Halloween costumes. He didn't want to. So I braced myself for a truly uneventful weekend.

When I got home from work on Fri, Joe said "Surprise - the furniture is ready." The store had called and left a message saying the furniture had just come in. Suddenly I was kind of glad that none of my attempts to make plans for the weekend had worked out! We began to make our new plans.

Our existing TV room sofa was going to Joe's brother's house in Bowie. We had hoped he could come and pick it up, but with such short notice, that wasn't going to happen. Fortunately, his house is on the way to the beach, so we put the sofa in our Suburban and dropped it off on the way. The love seat was going to Joe's sister in Alexandria, but we didn't have time to deliver it on Fri, so we left it in the TV room for some future delivery date.

We were both dreading getting the existing sofa and love seat out of the house, as we remembered how hard it was to get in. We couldn't use the front door because the furniture was too big to go around the corner to get into the TV room. We had to bring the furniture in through the exterior door to the TV room, which is not as wide as the front door. It just barely squeezed through - only after totally removing the door off of its hinge. So with great strain tempered with excitement, we finally extracted the old furniture to make way for the new stuff.

When we went to pick up the new furniture we really didn't think they'd be able to get both pieces inside the Suburban. We planned to take one piece home Sat morning, drive back to the beach Sat night, and take the second piece home on Sun. But we'd removed the 3rd row seat and flipped down the 2nd row seats, creating an impressive amount of space, so the loading guys were optimistic. It took a couple tries and several configurations, but amazingly they got both pieces into our truck!

With both pieces of furniture snugly in the truck and the weather forecast at the beach being good, we thought we'd stay up there for the weekend, and then unload the furniture on Sun evening. But after driving around at the beach with that load of furniture for about 20 minutes, we both agreed to just go home. We were excited to transform our TV room.

We got home around 4pm on Sat and unloaded the furniture, took all the protective plastic and cardboard off, and screwed on the feet. Then we placed the furniture on the wall where the TV/VCR/DVD had been, moved the area rugs, and decided to call it quits. It was 7pm and we were both ready for a shower and some food.

This morning we made a quick trip to our local hardware/variety store to pick up a few necessities and got back to work. Since we wanted to turn the room around and put the furniture where the TV had been, we needed to get the cable over to the other wall where the furniture had been. Fortunately I could pull the cable from the basement and poke it up threw a pre-drilled hole in exactly the right place. Then we put the TV/VCR/DVD onto the new entertainment center we'd bought last weekend from the scratch-n-dent area at Ikea (you can't even find the flaw) and placed it on the wall where the furniture had been. We replaced the lightbulbs in the overhead light that were too bright with some more appropriate lower watt bulbs, and slipped some rubber anti-skid discs under the eight feet of our new furniture, threw the ottoman back in and voila! It looks fabulous!

The new furniture is an ivory chenile, two-piece sectional. There is a sofa with a left arm, and a chaise with a right arm. Put them together and add the toss pillows with a graphic red & ivory design and add our existing red ottoman and you get a stunning designer look. (Michael: this is WAY better than the furniture you remember!) We even had time to deliver the old love seat to Joe's sister, and have an early dinner with his mom.

So much for weekends with no plans!