The Furniture Story
mattymatt editor’s note: I wrote this post a year ago, and just am getting around to posting it. The couch and chair are for sale right now on craigslist and ebay since we want to update our living room…
Heather and I moved in together on October 15th 2008. Time really flies.
We took our apartments and put them in boxes, and brought them to Queens. We didn’t break up! and we were (mostly) in good moods throughout. Our movers were stellar. They moved things in and out of our apartment that I didn’t think were possible. It was a great experience (kinda expensive though, but WORTH IT).
Being a girl, Heather is into pretty things. This includes interiors, and our new apartment needed to be pretty. I agree. However, I am a moron when it comes to interior decoration. I could tell you if things match, and I could find you a bunch of patterns and colors that matched and looked OK together, but the end result would probably look like a dentist’s office. Also, I never put things away. When you live with someone who likes things to look pretty, it becomes clear that dirty socks on the floor do not look pretty. Neither do wires. I like to get wires out and leave them everywhere. I also like to start projects that have to do with wires and tools, and then leave everything on the desk. This looks bad. Thats why men have garages and workshops, and women have, well, places that look nice. My homie Rockie mentions this when talking about photographic composition.
Getting to the point here, we wanted to get a pretty couch, chair and TV stand. When we were in France in 2007, we grabbed a catalog from this store called Maisons du Monde (houses of the world, or something like that). In this catalog was an amazing couch that we kept looking at over and over again, like… we have to find that couch somewhere in the US. So we looked and looked and looked. Nothing was even close to the simple and classic look of that “chesterfield” sofa. So I thought, why not just order the couch we really want, because by the time we get anything comparable from another store (Crate and Barrel, pottery barn, ikea, etc), we’re gonna be in for thousands of dollars anyway.
Maisons du Monde doesn’t deliver to the US. They deliver to Spain France, Italy and the UK. So, why not have the stuff we want delivered to an export warehouse in the UK, and then shipped to our house in NYC? I called and requested quotes from a bunch of different overseas moving companies in and around London. I went with the lowest price, which turned out to be £540 if I remember correctly. This is about $1000. So, if we got two chairs, a headboard and the famous couch, the total would turn out to be about $4000 delivered. A lot of people spend more than that on just a couch! That was the answer. I was nervous, ordering $3000 worth of furniture online and having it delivered to a warehouse in an industrial park in Suffolk.
Despite having all of this figured out in October, it still took me a few weeks to get over my discomfort of sending $4000 to strangers in Europe and hoping that furniture would arrive at my house. I paid a deposit to Abels removals (mover companies in England are called removals) on November 6, 2008, and I placed the order with Maisons du Monde (MdM) on November 7th. We were really hoping to get the furniture delivered before the new year. Abels said there was a storage container leaving for the US at the end of November, so as long as MdM delivered a few days before, our stuff would get here by Christmas! At this point we were basically sitting on the floor. We bought these funny flower petal shaped chairs at a flea market. And we had an office chair and an Ikea chair. Thats it. Not something you can really plop down on when you get home from a long day.
The furniture wasn’t delivered by November 28, or December 28th either. It was delivered on January 5th. Which means we missed the last boat of 2008. While studying the delivery slip, it said that some of the cartons were crushed when they arrived at the UK warehouse. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I emailed Abels and had them unpack everything and examine them for damage. They were very helpful, emailing me photos of angle of every item. There were a few scuffs and scrapes here and there, but otherwise the furniture looked ok, a huge relief. The headboard was extremely dusty, but I figured I could just clean it. It would have taken a lot of damage for me to call them and return something. The next question on my mind: When is the next boat?!?! Heather is like “when is the furniture coming” every day. And we are still watching TV on these weird little petal couches!
We got word the furniture shipped on March 17th. FINALLY. 4 and a half months later.