As I mentioned, my mother-in-law is downsizing. As a result, Nogglestead will receive an infusion of quality furniture. I’ve often said, perhaps only aloud and not on this blog, that the only good furniture we get, we receive as a gift, or lately, an inheritance. Which is mostly true, although we did buy an expensive laminate bedroom set a couple years after we moved in, replacing the bureaus we’d had as children, inheritances from my aunt Dale, and a headboard I’d bought at an estate sale for $20.
We received gifts of a sofa set when we moved both to Old Trees and to Nogglestead (from my mother-in-law), and they formed the centerpieces of our den and living room. When my beautiful wife moved to St. Louis and when we moved into our first home, we received recliners that my mother-in-law could sleep in, and those chairs have been our downstairs reading chairs almost the entirety of our residence at Nogglestead. The table and chairs on the lower level were also gifted to my beautiful wife when she moved into her apartment in St. Louis.
Which is not to say we haven’t bought furniture; in addition to the aforementioned bedroom set, we’ve bought fairly nice desks and a piano. Also, an arcade game or two. But as for outfitting our home with furniture sets or going furniture shopping, our focus in life lies elsewhere.
I kind of feel less of an adult for not focusing, even if it’s only once a decade, on our furniture or even on polishing Nogglestead—we have painted a couple of rooms in the twelve years we’ve been here, but we have not completely remade it in our own image, nor have we recarpeted—from my perspective, it seems a great bother to have to move the furniture and all those books. So perhaps hardwood or vinyl plank is somewhere in our distant future.
When I was growing up, my mother (and my parents, brief in my memory) didn’t go furniture shopping nor did they ever design a room with matching pieces. Most of the time, we got what we needed if we needed something, generally from yard sales or by the curb, and fit it in. Or inheritances—my mother got her bedroom set from her aunt Hattie and our 25” console television and console stereo from her mother. So I don’t have a good example of appropriate furnituration in my past.
Last weekend, we moved out the sofa-and-longue set from our lower level along with the oldest of the recliners and a kitchen table and chairs. The sofa set was originally upholstered with a miasma of fake leather; it was a compromise of sorts as I really wanted a sectional sofa for some reason. But faux leather and cats and later boys was a bad idea, and they pared it like a potato. Although I’d repaired the hassock, I never got bold enough to adhere the rest of the replacement black fake leather in place when patching might have worked.
We needed to get move the items out, and although the sofa and its attendant chair had good bones, it could use reupholstering. Thrift stores would not accept it, but friends’ Baptist church would accept it for their spring garage sale—or so the friends said, not having seen the sofa. Our friends were cleaning out a home of a recently passed parent, so we helped them take a load from that domicile since we’d rented a truck.
So this weekend, we get the new furniture. And we will add it to Nogglestead, although I’m not sure how much it will play into my boys’ memories of their home—they only have a couple of years left here, but they’re important years, so perhaps the youngest will remember the desk in his room where he did homework throughout high school fondly. Heaven knows those years fill the memory banks with minutiae that time and adulthood and responsibilities cannot dislodge (take my word for it).
Hopefully, the new furniture will still make our family room a chill pad, but more importantly, hopefully, it will prove more comfortable to my beautiful wife, who eventually grew to hate hate the sofa, which she found uncomfortable for sitting in for any length of time, which meant that movies or episodes of The Blacklist often found us sitting on the floor by the end.
I suppose I should just accept the gifts and not dwell too much on the past and the future when doing so. But, c’mon, man, that’s my wont and my raison d’être, or at least the one I assign to myself.
