No one tells you how much you’ll miss a sofa until you don’t have one. You might’ve heard people reflect on how younger adults have lost many of their “third spaces”—a place to go and be outside of home and work or school—and, to me, a sofa also functions as a kind of “third space.”
We moved to our nation’s illustrious capital (all irony intended) over four months ago. Once Andrew began drawing his fancy consultant-in-the-city check, I was determined to buy us a proper sofa that wasn’t a cheap DIY affair from someplace like Wayfair. So, of course, I went down the sofa-hunting wormhole, determined the best option balancing price and quality, and put in an order for a custom piece. Now, this sounds lavish, but when a sofa from someplace like Room & Board would cost the same with a similar turnaround time, it becomes a reasonable proposition. In the meantime, I figured we could make do with some more cheap mass-produced armchairs as we waited patiently for our ultimate reward.
Months dragged on. Finally, the angels broke through the clouds! We had a shipping confirmation; it might even arrive before the holidays! Hallelujah!
The glorious day came. I shoved everything in our living room to one side to make room. Two very nice men came to the loading entrance at the back of our apartment building. I showed them the elevator, although it’s not a freight elevator so the sofa didn’t fit. Then I showed them the utility stairs. I don’t think I quite followed all they said, but I was dismayed to find that whatever obscure rules of the contracted delivery company they were from meant that they could only do three flights of stairs and somehow that meant they wouldn’t make it up to the second story. I kept my cool and showed them the front entrance with the broad main stairwell that also somehow met their three-flight criteria. Eventually they made it around to the front entrance and were just preparing to take it up the stairs…
…until our building manager walked by and emphatically told them not to take it up the main stairs. Something about a history of broken bannisters and fool-hardy movers. My heart sank. I didn’t think they could get the sofa up the utility stairs; they were so narrow and tightly wound. The movers tried anyway, but confirmed that they couldn’t maneuver it enough. So like a scene out of a bad Hallmark romance, the rain poured forth and I held back tears as my beloved piece of furniture left my view.
I was hopping angry. Still am, if I’m being honest. Yes, I get the whole thing of inept millennials trying to take a large couch up the main stairs and it tipping over the bannister and causing damage. But come on! A perfectly normal-sized (even small!) sofa, tightly wrapped in paper and cellophane, handled by two muscular men who are professional furniture deliverers? Also, if we aren’t able to get a sofa up just one flight of steps, what the heck are all our neighbours doing? We’ve never seen anyone moving in with a sofa in our short tenure at the apartment building, but are they all just living sofa-less? Do they have some special teleportation key we’re missing and why didn’t management say something like “Oh, by the way, no one can really move a sofa in”?
I was also panicked, which is an expected response when the contracted movers say your sofa worth close to $3,000 is undeliverable. I was told by the sofa company that there was nothing to be done about a sofa if it didn’t physically fit. Despair overtook me. But! Then the rep mentioned that they could try putting me in contact with another company they sometimes contracted that could disassemble and reassemble their bespoke sofas. Hope has tentatively reappeared (and all for the low, low price of probably another grand to pay the specialists)!
I’m nervously waiting for further updates after the sofa company initially emailed the disassembly company. I know I can live an indeterminate number of more weeks with too-hard armchairs, but the gaping hole in my life without this precious third space is keenly felt. I can sit on the bed and do stuff, but my posture gets absolutely destroyed. Otherwise, I can sit at a table with my office chair that, while fancy and ergonomic, offers little cushioning and only allows for a standard sitting posture. So, as someone who likes to lounge while reading and contort myself into odd shapes while doing craft projects, a sofa is a vital vehicle for my comfort and happiness. I’ve tried a bunch of different coffee shops and only two have something akin to sofas, but social mores mean I can’t plop myself down and stretch out with a stack of books for the afternoon.
Hope springs eternal, as the saying goes. Some day in the hopefully-near future, I’ll be writing my post from the glorious situ of my new sofa.
