Sofa Sagas: Every Couch Search Is Like a Love Story

Welcome to Sofa Sagas—stories about the circuitous search for a very important and occasionally fraught piece of furniture.

For five years I lived in a New York apartment with furniture that had been bought to furnish a single-family home in Northern California in the early 1990s. The deal was that when my parents got divorced, they offered me a love seat that was way too big for my apartment, along with an eight-seater dining table and a bench to go with it. I guess they preferred to pay to ship the furniture 3,000 miles to a neutral party than to fight over it, and I was young, broke, and sad that my parents were getting divorced, so I said sure, what the hell. The scale of everything was off and so were the vibes.

Once it got to my place, my elderly dog—who had also recently relocated from California—peed all over the sofa twice in her final years, and instead of reupholstering it, I bought a stretchy sofa cover from Bed Bath & Beyond that was a little too small for the cushion, making it look like a giant khaki pinto bean. Not long after that, a cat I was watching for a friend did the same thing. Against the advice of all of my loved ones, I adopted a puppy, who sent the sofa to its grave, aesthetically speaking. What I’m saying is that my first couch and I began our relationship in rancid territory, emotionally and actually, and there it stayed for five years.

The one that never materialized 

Recently, my mom—the same one who shipped me her divorce couch in 2012—claimed to be a big believer that you have to be careful about the provenance of used furniture because energy "clings" to it in a way it doesn’t to other used items. So maybe it was the wack juju attached to my hand-me-down love seat that moved me finally to spring for a couch of my own. I offered to buy two friends a beer if they’d go with me to the Red Hook Ikea, and they, like me, said sure, what the hell. After we were three rounds deep, they helped me try out and subsequently order a Karlstad two-seater in a gray that I would hesitate to call life-affirming. Whatever. It would do the trick.

Of course, if that had been the end of it, you wouldn’t be reading this and I wouldn’t have spent the summer of 2018 watching The Americans on the floor. I foolishly scheduled a curbside bulk item disposal for the old couch before the new one arrived, a move not unlike quitting a job without another lined up. Thus, when I missed the delivery window of my Karlstad, I was left couchless. Then I missed the next delivery window, and the third.

When I say "missed," I’m using Ikea’s term. Did I stay home, vigilant, for the entirety of all the designated windows? Yes. Was I on lookout for a delivery worker nigh constantly? Also yes. I barely recall blinking. Did I have my phone on me, the ringer turned up as high as it would go, in case of logistical snafu? Of course. Did I use the bathroom several times over the course of the three days in question? I’ll admit that I did, and that must have been when I "missed" the delivery of my Karlstad. I had a vacation planned that I didn’t want to skip just for my Karlstad, so I paid another friend, again in beer, to hang out at my apartment during the fourth alleged delivery window. Not wanting to take any chances, I budgeted for adult diapers.

Yet, as I pulled away from my apartment in a summer downpour, a feeling came over me as deep and as certain as love: I would never rest my butt on the Karlstad.

And lo, it came to pass. The friend texted me to say it never showed. I gave up and called Ikea to cancel my order and request a refund, feeling silly for allowing myself to be stood up by a couch I hadn’t even been that attracted to in the first place.

The one that over-promised  

After that vacation I began to see the Karlstad as a necessary detour on my road to a modular sofa system made by the direct-to-consumer brand Burrow. As one does, I saw the couch late at night, advertised to me on Instagram. At $825.27, it was much more expensive than the one I’d tried to buy from Ikea, but if I’d learned anything from l’affaire Karlstad it was that you get what you pay for. Burrow promised that the sofa would grow with me—that I could buy a love seat now and then get a middle piece to make it a three-seater later when I upgraded to a bigger place. Burrow was hopeful for my future, believing I wouldn’t live in a rathole forever. It promised to stay with me not just for now, but for years to come. More than that, even—it was willing to change itself alongside me. On September 11, I ordered a love seat in charcoal.

A week later, a Burrow customer service ambassador named David emailed me to apologize for what he anticipated to be a shipping delay of several days caused by the landfall of Hurricane Florence, and offering me a $50 refund for my trouble. I assured him it was no problem and conveyed my hope that the Burrow team was staying safe.

When it arrived, the Burrow love seat felt easy immediately, and finally, I could rest my weary ass. I was so thrilled, in fact, that I emailed Burrow customer service ambassador David to let him know it had arrived, something I’d never done before and haven’t done since. I wrote:

Hi David,

God bless burrow[sic]! Our order arrived today, earlier than expected, and was a snap to put together. After two months and one refund from a company I will not name other than to say it rhymes with shmi-shmea, I am so glad we bought a couch from you guys.

Kelly

David did not write back. He had either died in Hurricane Florence or been rendered speechless by the depth of my sentiment. Instead, someone named Tara responded:

Hi Kelly,

Thank you for your email!

We are so happy you are enjoying your Burrow couch! If there is anything at all we can assist you with, please let us know.

Best,
Tara

As it turned out, I would need Tara’s assistance sooner than either of us could have known.

With my Burrow couch beneath my butt and the wind at my back, life started looking up. So much so that within a few months of purchase, my husband and I did, indeed, move to a bigger apartment. (I got a great job that my Burrow couch believed I deserved, so now I could afford it.) To celebrate, we navigated to Burrow’s homepage with the intention of buying an additional module for the sofa we had been assured repeatedly was modular.

But there was a problem. Although it had been less than a year since we’d bought (the initial two thirds of) the couch of our dreams, Burrow had since stopped manufacturing the model we had. In its place was something called the Nomad. The Nomad looked basically the same as the sofa we’d bought fewer than 365 calendar days earlier, so it felt like a good bet that a Nomad part would be compatible with our existing love seat. This was not, it turned out, a good bet. In our subsequent dealings with two different customer service ambassadors, neither of whom was my beloved David, we discovered the following:  

It looks like you have our original version of the sofa which has sold out in the past month. We have switched to our Nomad collection which is not backwards compatible so seats would not be able to be added into your existing piece.

I sat on my existing piece, a humbled woman. I didn’t know what "not backwards compatible" meant but I considered reassuring Burrow that maybe it could be that if it just tried. I thought about buying the Nomad middle piece anyway, even though it wasn’t backwards compatible, and then forcing it into the middle of the old love seat, and hoping for the best. But in my heart of hearts, I knew that is no way to live. I burned with embarrassment. I was a cliché. How quickly summer’s promises of lifelong love had fizzled the moment one party actually asked for what the other had promised in the heat of passion.

The one that f*cked me

I lived with my stumpy little Burrow couch for two more non-mind-blowing years without complaint. But in May 2020, it started to look like I was going to be sitting on this thing indefinitely, and I began to seriously consider a sofa that I could settle down with—for good. I put the word out that I needed a new couch, and a friend who lived in a fancy downtown building came through within days. A woman in her building—whom I’ll call Susan—needed to get rid of a West Elm sleeper sofa in the lightest shade of gray the mind can conjure because she decided she actually wanted it in white. If I could pay in advance, be there by Friday, and move it myself, it could be mine for a mere $300.

Susan lived in the kind of building where you have to email the doorman to alert him that you’re coming and request permission to use the service elevator. My husband and I rented a cargo van, and we showed up in the Financial District on a record-breakingly rainy day, in full personal protective equipment (also required by the building). Susan had assured us that two able-bodied adults could for sure lift the couch, and since this was pre-vaccine Covid, we didn’t want to dragoon anyone else into the project. It was just us.

When Susan answered the door to her apartment, it was immediately clear that she’d never lifted anything in her life. Not to mention, she was clutching her stomach, informing us that she’d recently had a hysterectomy so she couldn’t help us move it. Fine fine fine! We waved her away. Put your feet up, Susan, we’ll take it from here. Can we get you anything? 

The apartment was outfitted in the kind of textiles that made me wonder if Eileen Fisher makes rugs (she doesn’t). It had a terrace that wrapped around generous, clean windows. A beige French bulldog I suspected had been chosen for his color waddled around, growling unconvincingly. Despite the presence of the widest crystal wine glasses known to man hanging in the kitchen, it wouldn’t have shocked me to learn that red wine wasn’t permitted on the premises. All of this filled me with great joy. I was about to get a basically free couch from the world’s most tasteful, anal-retentive owner.

And then my husband went to lift it. Not to brag, but this is a guy who spent 10 years working in a trade profession that required hours a day of heavy lifting, and he was good at it. And yet, he could not move this thing even a centimeter off the floor. Susan apologized again for her hysterectomy getting in the way of offering help, but also warned us to be careful not to "scratch"(???) the rug under the couch in a tone I wouldn’t personally use with someone I liked. We regrouped. Susan’s wince deepened. The couch needed to be out that day, she reminded us, because the white(r) one was scheduled to be dropped off in the afternoon. I called the doorman wondering if there was any chance he could help us. No, but he could lend us his little hand truck. We took him up on it, preferring not to think about the three flights of stairs that awaited us once we got back to our apartment.

I probably don’t need to tell you that the hand truck did nothing. The couch appeared to be getting heavier each time we tried to lift it. We had to give up. We apologized to Susan for bothering her, and asked if she might refund us our $300, which Susan (naturally) refused. Her argument was that she now had to go to the trouble of getting the new couch delivery people to take the old couch out, too, and that was easily worth like a grand. Plus, we’d probably exposed her to Covid and scratched her rug. We had no choice but to return to our cargo van, out $300—plus the cost of the van rental—for a couch we’d never have the pleasure of sitting on. I forwarded my correspondence with Susan to a lawyer friend who was sympathetic, but not that sympathetic. "You never pay in advance," she wrote, before reminding me that although she was a lawyer, she was not my lawyer.

Life keeps going 

I’ll cut to the chase: after three failed attempts at getting a big, luxurious couch without shelling out for a big, luxurious couch, we finally shelled out for a big, luxurious couch. For a few weeks running I’d been flirting with a sofa called the Sofa, manufactured by a company called Floyd. Based in Detroit, Floyd makes beds and end tables and bookshelves and sofas that theoretically you can put together yourself and feel like the kind of person who could, if she were just a little bit cooler or more artsy, live in Detroit herself.

Although the Sofa promised me it was stain-resistant, I ordered swatches of every fabric color they offered and rubbed them all over my dog, Louise, to see which picked up her black hair most easily. Blue seemed to be the most Louise-resistant, so I went for that. The actual Sofa took forever to arrive because it was 2021 and the global supply chain was in tatters, but once it did, it was easy to put together. It tucked perfectly into a little corner of my living room under the window. It was elevated above the floor on little steel legs so it gave an airy impression, even as it looked cozy snuggled up under a reading light. I was delighted. It had been so long since I’d sat on a couch other than my own that I had no point of reference for whether it was comfortable or not. At this point in my saga, that felt beside the point anyway. I owned a couch.

Given my history with couches, I doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that I didn’t really like the Sofa in the end. It turned out not to be all that comfortable, it didn’t fold out into a bed, and it didn’t have storage. Blue or not, Lou made it disgusting. But it was ours, and over the next five years, our whole life happened there. I longed for a baby on that couch, and I sat on it to give myself IVF shots when the longing didn’t work. I got good news on that couch and bad. I lost a job on that couch and got another. When I brought the baby home from the hospital, it was the first place we plunked ourselves down. I dropped a spring roll on the baby’s head while sitting on that couch. The baby rolled off it once. Every time the baby met a member of her family, it was on that couch. Her uncle slept there for a week to help us out, and both my husband’s mom and mine slept there more nights than I can count. As I type this, my mom is convalescing from a broken shoulder on that couch. (She would never have fit on the love seat she sent me in 2012.) When the baby, who is no longer a baby, gets home from preschool this evening, it will be the only place in our apartment where she will ever hold her body still. I don’t really like the couch, but I do love it. I doubt I’ll ever get rid of it.

More Sofa Sagas:

It Took Three Moves in Three Years to Find the Right Couch For Me

My Dream Sofa, the Couch Doctor, and Me