First world problems with furniture.

Going from 724 square feet to 2,510 square feet is going to be a huge change for us, and we realized a while back that we have only a fraction of the furniture we'll need to furnish our new home. However, 20% down is obviously eating up a lot of our savings, so we don't really have the luxury of going out and spending thousands of dollars on new furniture right now. But we decided that it would be okay to go ahead and focus on a few basics, one of those being couches for the downstairs living room.

I had no idea what a huge process this would turn out to be...

When you're buying quality furniture that you expect to last for 10-15 years you really want to be sure you love what you buy. So a couple weeks ago my mom and I spent an entire day visiting furniture stores and we just didn't see anything at all that seemed right, until this:


Ignore the ugly ottoman, but we really liked the style of the sofa. I also loved the pattern of the pillow fabric,
and thought this little accent chair would go great with the set. Plus, everything was on sale... Fantastic! 

Having an accent chair in the same fabric as the sofa pillows seems to be super popular right now, and I quickly became obsessed with doing it. Here are some examples we saw (ignore some of the ugly fabrics and sofa styles, but you'll get the general idea...)


An assortment of displays with pillows that match the accent chairs. Love it!

Stew and I did some research on the manufacturer of the set that I liked and he agreed that it would be a good choice for our living room. But I wanted him to see it in person and help choose the main sofa fabric, so we stopped by the store at the next opportunity. Selecting the perfect color ended being more difficult than we thought, so we decided to check out some fabric samples and take them up to the model home to see how everything would look in our actual house. This is where we ran into some problems.



Current set up in the model home.

Once in the model, we realized that we really want light-colored sofas, but the pillow print that I had previously chosen only goes with a darker sofa fabric. And upon further thinking, we actually liked the cleaner, more modern look of the model furniture much better than our original choice. So... back to square one. We figured out the manufacturer of the model sofas, looked up some local dealers, and began to track them down. I mean hey, if a professional designer put the room together and it looks great, why re-invent the wheel, right?

Eventually we found the exact match, but of course to that set it will cost twice as much as the original set we picked out. So there's the conundrum... Do we drop the cash and get exactly what we want? Or do we live with another, less expensive sofa that we found that is very similar, but not an exact match? Plus, which accent chair do we choose? Does it come with a matching ottoman or would be have to find one? Is it the same brand so we can match the fabric to the sofa pillows? Does this store have free shipping? Is that one having a sale next month? How long can we wait to decide? Ugh, it's all very frustrating and overwhelming! [FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS]

In any case, besides the dilemma of choosing the set that we want, we also need to select a fabric for the sofa pillows and chairs (the original fabric with the branches is out), and there are so many to choose from!


This is just a tiny sample of what's available. There are literally hundreds
to choose from. I actually really liked the black and white bird pattern
in the center, but I don't know if it would be too much on a chair...

The entire process has be so overwhelming that we've decided to just take a step back and think things through. We don't want to purchase something in a hurry and then get it into the new house only to find out that we don't love it after all. We'd rather live in a basically empty house for a while instead of rush into a decision about something so permanent and expensive.

But when we do pull the trigger it will take 6-8 weeks for the pieces to be made and delivered, so early guests beware... bring your own chair!