Thursday, January 29, 2009

the couch

To trash or not to trash? That is the question.
We have a couch. We bought it ourselves right after we bought our first place.
From IKEA.
I love IKEA, but sometime you get what you pay for.
The cushions squish after just one person sits on them, and it is cream, with some dry erase marker decorating the back. We can wash the cover, and have (very often), but the last time or two I think we shrunk it.
So the cover doesn't quite fit and is stained and it squishes if anyone so much as breathes on it. SO... we thought about getting another cover made through Bemz. If you have and IKEA furniture in your house, you really should check these guys out. But it still has the cheap foam and the squishy problem continues. When we were looking for dining room chairs in December, I sat down on a couch in the Sears showroom, to feed the baby quickly, and discovered the nice lather couch I was sitting on was only $100 more than the new covers we were contemplating. Well for $100 bucks it hardly seems worth the trouble of recovering and possibly upgrading the cushions of our original Ektorp. And while the economy is still turning down, I imagine that furniture prices will stay about as reasonable as they have ever been.

Here are the Bemz samples.
That is the dilemma.  Complicated by the fact that our basement is not big enough to accommodate the current couch. So it would truly have to find a new home. And did I mention it is a sofa bed? So that feature would also be lost.
Not quite sure what to do about it all, but leaning towards an entirely new couch, sometime in the future. For now, if you come to my house don't look too close!!

2 comments:

  1. I say get a new one. We got one from Sears in the catalogue that we had never seen in person, let alone sit on it and I LOVE IT!!! It is the best couch that we have ever had.

    Word of advice though, if you do decide to go to leather, just know that the leather does stretch out and the cushions get lost in it over time as well. This time we went with the faux suede or whatever it is called and it cleans really easily!!!

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  2. Ultra suede I think... hubby says no to the texture. He is extremely picky about certain details! I don't think we will get leather as the dining chairs, and living room ottoman and chairs are all leather, so it would be overkill. Ideally I would get something with a slipcover , but not IKEA... any ideas?

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