4th Ring of Hell: Furniture Selection

With the Jerotz family coming, we were incentivized to start trying to finish up the house. We had grown complacent after the move and the living room remained empty and Cristin’s office still served as Rudy’s bathroom. Cristin hired some guys to install a chicken wire wall to create a bathroom at the bottom of the basement stairs for Rudy. They were also tasked to do some other stuff but the progress was decidedly slow so we elected to just do it ourselves. That was fine with me, I would much rather be tinkering than selecting furniture, which was the other item on the agenda. We spent an absurd amount of time on this exercise. Furniture, particularly upholstered furniture largely has a form vs. function tradeoff with one the antithesis of the other. I am all about function – these are couches after all – but Cristin really wanted something that had some kind of look that she had a hard time defining for me. Fortunately, on my team I had our prior couches which are adequately attractive and super comfortable for their apartment size. I think this helped sway her and after visiting Boston Interiors it seemed to sink in that how they feel trumps the “60s are back” look. Speaking of which, we ended up getting “the Draper” model sleeper sofa for her office. For the living room we went with an L-shaped assembly, the result of many evenings of deliberations, measurements, and blue tape on the floor like a coroners outline, the deceased here being my sanity. In the end, as I always do, I just define constraints and tell Cristin to select whatever she wants as long as it fits those constraints. This process has gotten us through a lot of decisions and usually works pretty well, aside from the time Cristin bullied me into getting the color I did not want for my current car.