The Great Furniture Hunt

I used to love to go into furniture stores and just browse. It was fun to look at all the different arrangements while envisioning how I wanted my house to look. Now, though, I find myself both in need of furniture and in, more or less, the financial position to buy furniture. As I’ve blogged recently, my fiancée and I recently moved into a townhouse, so we’re actually in the market for furniture. We have a very nice couch and matching chair we bought from my Mom. We also have a drop leaf pub table and chair set that we use for our kitchen/dining room table. Next to the recliner, we have a floor lamp that has a glass top table built into it. We’ve repurposed a microwave stand into a TV stand, and a bathroom rack into a bar. What we’re lacking is a coffee table and end tables. We’re using a wicker coffee table and a pair of folding TV trays as our end tables at the moment. They work, as far as functionality, but we really would like to have proper tables.

We’ve looked online, at BigLots, Target, Wal-mart and have also looked at a couple of dedicated furniture stores. The conclusion we’ve come to is, we have Macy’s Furniture Gallery tastes with a BigLots budget. Seriously, BigLots has a coffee table with matching end tables for around $170 sold as a set, versus the average coffee table at Macy’s or Rooms To Go being $150-$200 for just the coffee table while the end tables cost just as much - each (And that’s their low end furniture. We saw one table at Macy’s that we both really liked, but it was $700! We didn’t pay that much for the couch and chair together.).

I didn’t realize that picking out a coffee table and end tables that we both like, and that doesn’t simultaneously cost half a month’s salary, would be so difficult. I think I’ve just about come to the conclusion that the furniture collection she found on eBay is going to be the way to go. Then again, we do have an IKEA in Atlanta, so we may look there as well, first. Either way, we’re probably going to have to go with “put it together your damn self” furniture -- at least until one of us wins the lottery *wink*.

~ JC