Furniture Hell

So we're once again actively pursuing the purchase of new furniture for our living room. We're looking for a sofa and chair-and-a-half or something equivalent. Doesn't sound hard, does it?

We've started a couple of weeks ago, and had covered Eurway, Ashley and Star. Yesterday we spend around five continuous hours in misc. furniture stores. I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about furniture and furniture business. We've avoided department stores and "cheap" furniture, but even so, there are is a gazillion of stores in Austin.

We warmed up on Friday after work at Basset where I got a cruel awakening as to what good furniture costs these day (think of a sofa as a really, really nice laptop).

Yesterday after brunch, we started on the "Furniture Mile" on Airport Blvd. with The Chair King (nice outdoor furniture but not much for the living room), followed by Haverty's where Jfer fell in love with the chair-and-half from this collection (of course, they only have it in "blue velvet", "tomato" and "sun flower") and the RoomStore ("acres and acres of furniture").

We then moved on to the Anderson Ln. furniture district and stopped by Lack's (hey, this stuff's affordable), then Norwalk ("we grow our own trees in our forest and kiln dry the wood ourself"), followed by Copenhagen (we'd need a swanky loft apartment for this stuff) and finished off at the monstrous, four story Louis Shanks fortress with their three story parking garage.

At that point we were totally pooped and told the sale's lady that we were sick of furniture and going to the movies. I don't think she was too disappointed, considering that we were the only prospects wearing sandal and T-Shirts.

This meant we got to skip Ethan Allen and some other sofa place across the street and visit Amy's instead.

So I've discovered that furniture stores fall into several categories. Ones that have a few colors/patters for each piece of furniture, are affordable but probably don't last all that long and won't quite match the rest of the room. Then there are those that make you select your fabric from their "800 samples" in different "grades" and they make you look at a big portion of them and expect you to decide. They are also pretty darn expensive - especially the fabric grades you like. And if you screw up the fabric selection you can't really blame it on their limited offerings. I'll blame it on Jfer, of course.

Then there is Louis Shanks which is plain scary. We only saw a small fraction of what they carry, since most of it is in the opulent mansion style which we're not going for. There were some interesting pieces which seemed affordable until we noticed where the decimal point was really supposed to go. They not only have hundreds of fabrics to choose from, they also have tens of manufacturers with many catalogs and custom build options. Freaks, I tell ya! I'm sure it's the nirvana of every interior decorator.

The final lesson we learned is that you want to take your digital camera with you. This way you'll remember what the 25th couch looked like, and you won't have to write down all the pertinent info.