Couched!

Furniture shopping is HARD. Like, geometry hard.

One of the things I love about my house is that it has a finished basement. We were super-hyped about this because it allows us to have more of a gathering room upstairs and then an entertainment room downstairs. (I refuse to call it a "Formal Living Room" because it's anything but formal.) However, I only owned one couch prior to buying the house, so we were completely lacking furniture for our entertainment room. Currently, there's just an unwatched TV surrounded by stuff we haven't unpacked yet.

So couch shopping was in order! We started the process a few months ago, thinking we'd have everything already unpacked and set up. Hahahahaha! *wipes tear from eye* From the start, I wanted either a couch with an attached chaise, or some kind of sectional.

Anyhow, our first stop was Crate & Barrel. They have lots of lovely sofas that aren't gigantic. This is important because we have a real size restriction on what will fit down our stairs. 1910 Victorians are not known for their roomy stairways and corners.

Our first selection was the City sectional. It came apart in all the right places to fit down the stairs, and it was comfortable, but ultimately I didn't feel it was right. I really wanted something with arms on the side (photo via http://www.crateandbarrel.com/):

So we continued our search. The next selection, the Sidecar sectional, also came from Crate & Barrel. I loved the fabric on this one, and it had arms just like I wanted. The downside? There was no way the long piece would EVER fit down our stairs. We even built a mock-up to try. (Photo via http://www.crateandbarrel.com/)

At this point we'd scoured Crate & Barrel so hard we left scuff marks. Obviously, our couch was not coming from there. So we trekked over to another great store, Room and Board. They had lots of great options! I was letting go of the sectional idea, but I still really wanted a chaise. That allowed us to immediately write off anything that was just a plain sofa. We walked the store a few times, sitting on almost everything. But the clear winner had greeted us as we walked in the door: The Reese (via http://www.roomandboard.com/):

It had a chaise. It had a good style. It was comfortable. It would fit down the stairs. And we could customize it with any fabric in the store!

We picked the Teton Ink. It's really hard to tell on the screen, but there are lots of blues and tans, which would stand out in our basement! Because of the custom fabric, it will take about eight weeks before we get it. But that will give us plenty of time to finish unpacking the basement....