Furnishing

Yesterday L and I bought furniture at Restore, the Habitat for Humanity store in Dedham, items to be delivered this coming Saturday.

In a fit of piqued frustration, last weekend we had put all our living room furniture out on the street (for which we got a ticket). Although bright and warm in color, the chairs and loveseat were impossible to sit in or on for any length of time: saggy, slippery, swallowy. Oh yes, and the rug went too. So the space was bare, echo-y, virtually uninhabitable. Left too long this 'living room' would accumulate piles of stuff and become a lumber room (once again) but, no fear, grandchildren, daughter and son-in-law are coming next weekend for a week and something must be in place, something.

What is interesting, reflecting on it, was the way we came to a unanimity of satisfaction on the sofa-loveseat set and wingback chair purchase we finally made. In the big warehouse, there were chairs and sofas available in many different styles, fabrics, conditions of wear, structural underpinnings, none of them or any small combination of them out of our price range. Also, we were wide open regarding which particular elements or look we wanted in the living room, ready to just have chairs, for instance, or a chair and loveseat as before. Coordination of styles and colors was a consideration but not compelling. The one essential was sittability. We didn’t want to feel ourselves sliding off or into whatever we were sitting on. In particular, we wanted at least one good reading chair. Oh, and we needed at least one piece of furniture big and sturdy enough for our son-in-law.

So how did it happen, I wonder now, that after roaming up and down aisles of sofas, squeezing by coffee tables, testing by plunking down, bouncing, wriggling and relaxing, after criticizing and appreciating, and imaginative assembling different items in the showcase area into ensembles for our actual (small) space, after sharing the individual favorites we’d like to spend more time on, and those others (the saggy, the unyielding, the plain awkward) we absolutely refused to allow, after all this, we came to the selection that lay as lightly on both of our minds as the set and chair we settled on did. There were lots of possible combinations and individual items, and we are two very different individuals (don't we know it), but somehow in this process we came as a couple to know what exactly we wanted.

This is interesting: the dynamics of collaborative choice. L and I have a lot of practice working with each other; we’d been discussing generally the matter of furniture for some time; and we are neither of us fussy. The process was like turning dials on a combination lock until the tumblers fall into place and the door swings easily open.

Somehow in the space of our conversation as we moved around that warehouse space, we held up what was different combinations of what was possible against what was acceptable and found a configuration of options that comfortably inhabited both spheres; that, as it were, sat on as easily on us as we, we hope, will on it.