We get to the store. We do not find the couch. Luckily, we were driving around in Liz's red convertible Volkswagen beetle so the trip to the second...and third store was quite pleasant in the beautiful weather.
We found nothing. As a last result, we hit up IKEA. I have been there a bajillion times lately and never found a couch I liked that was in my super-low price range. But, we figured, two heads are better than one. And Liz's head is 10 times better than mine, so we couldn't lose.
Blah blah blah...lots of cool products at IKEA. We made it through the showroom and the bottom level of decor with nothing. Finally, we check out the As Is section. It's all the broken, incomplete or dirty products. Sounds a lot like me!
Well GUESS WHAT. We end up finding a couch! For LESS THAN what I almost bought a used couch full of cat hair for. It was 45 percent off and I didn't even stop to figure out what made this gem such a steal. I just decided I needed it. Now. We learn that the As Is section is very demanding. Sure, we could buy it. But we had to move it out that day...they wouldn't hold it for us.
Did I mention we had arrived at IKEA in a convertible Volkswagen beetle? 'Cause we did. (Um, in hindsight, it would have been impossible to pick up a couch ANYwhere with a two-door car.)
Could we drive real slow and balance the couch on the back? No. Could we disassemble it? Shockingly, no. We had to call for reinforcements. We called my mom, my sister, a couple of my friends who have cars larger than a beetle. No one could help. No one, that is, except Kim.
Kim's boyfriend has a pickup truck. He works at night though, so access to his truck was questionable. But we had nothing to lose. I called Kim.
"Hey Kim, I love you and you are beautiful. What are you doing tonight?"
"Hey Pharon. You're weird. I'm at Home Depot."
"Really? Where?"
"Bloomington."
IKEA is in Bloomington.
"Really, Kim??? Any chance you have access to Brandon's truck?"
"Yeah, I'm using his truck tonight to move some tiles for my mom."
Freak. Out.
Long story short, Kim arrived at IKEA like a knight in shining Michael Kors. The three of us girls hauled the couch into the bed of the truck, made minimal efforts to secure the couch which was too long and sagged off the end of the open tailgate just a bit, and we were off. Liz crammed all the cushions in her tiny car and we met back at my place.
Cut to my apartment. There are approximately 100 corners I never realized existed in my building until I in my wedges and Kim in her white pants tried to maneuver a COUCH into an ELEVATOR. More than once, Liz helpfully called out "PIVOT! PIV--AHHHT!" Like they do on Friends. Me doubled-over laughing was not helping.
We FINALLY get the couch - which somehow now weighed approximately 563 gajillion pounds - into my apartment. All of a sudden it looked ENORMOUS. Liz was all "Pharon, you can't put a couch in the middle of a room full of boxes and expect it to look right. You have to move stuff."
Fine. I'll move stuff. Tomorrow. Before Kim and Liz could escape, I ripped open the slipcover. (I had to run all the way back through the IKEA showroom to get the slipcover. I ruined Liz's vision by explaining I would not pay more for a slipcover than I did for the couch, so we agreed on
It was like pulling my brother's toddler-sized Hot Wheels shirt over my post-college body. I gave up. I felt bad making Liz and Kim hang around while I sweated and panted my way through an event that was sure to be unpleasant, so I called it a night. Kim left to curse my name while Liz and I unwinded with a glass of wine at Claire's.
The point is: I GOT A COUCH. My apartment is (nearly) complete! And it looks GREAT!
Yaaaaaaaaaaaay! Tomorrow, I'll put the cover on, I swear. And I'll move all the stuff around it to make the place a little less, um, horrifying. Looks good, doesn't it?!
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