Painted By Economists: Impulse Purchase

So, I'm going to start this post with the moral of the story. If your husband checks in before making an impulse purchase, make sure it fits into the house before agreeing to it.

Now the story: We have a nice finished attic in our big old house. A big space that seems like it should be useful for something but so far has not been used for much. My mother in law used it as a writing garret when she was here a coupe weeks ago and I sometimes go up for a change of scenery. There's a bathroom up there that I was using for showers until the shower started leaking (another story). But that's it. Otherwise it was a big, empty space.

So we were talking the other night about how we were going to use the space. We really want to use it as a TV room, since we are dead set against having a TV in our living room and watching shows on the computer in our office is getting a bit old. But we need a TV, some way to broadcast stuff to our TV (another computer? An internet tv box? A DVD player? Something else?), and somewhere to sit. We did a little shopping for these things, but didn't really decide on anything.

Then my husband emails me yesterday with a Craiglist ad for a couch and a loveseat that are a decent price and the guy will deliver. I have a paycheck coming in next week, so I said sure. The guy came that night with two quite nice, and quite large and heavy, pieces of furniture.

Remember, I said it was a nice finished attic we needed the furniture for. They needed to go up two flights of stairs with several sharp corners involved. The couches live on our porch until my daughter is safely in bed, then we try getting the big one up. I was at the top, huffing and puffing as I tried to figure out where on earth I ought to hold it such that my legs wouldn't get stuck beneath it as I pulled it up towards me. Somehow we got it up the first flight of stairs, including around the first tight corner. We took a little break on the landing then started on the next flight. The next flight of stairs was narrower and the couch wouldn't fit. Solution: take down the hand rail. That seemed to work at first. We got the couch about 1/3 of the way in, but then it got stuck again. We learned that our new couch has a nice decorative arched back, which meant the middle of the couch was taller than the ends. It was starting to look like the couch simply was not going to go, but we really had neither the stamina nor the will to carry the darn thing back down again.

There was one more thing to try. My husband pulled the door to the attic off of its hinges in order to make the doorway as wide as it possibly could be. He didn't quite understand what was (or wasn't) securing it, so it came down with a bang, but it didn't kill any cats or break any walls, so all is well. And that was enough to allow the couch to go through, with only a little bit of additional difficulty. We somehow summoned the strength to get the loveseat up there too. So now we have a partially furnished attic. The story has a happy ending. But I think when/if we move, the attic furniture comes with the house.

Now for some pictures: