Tag Archives: small scale furniture

Keeping the Huge Chairs in the Small Living Room

By Claire Posted in Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

Before the pandemic began, we had begun buying smaller furniture for our living room. Our old furniture was scaled for a 26’ long room, so it was clearly too big for this living room.

For quite a while, we’ve lived with just fewer pieces of furniture in the room. But they are clearly too big in scale and I wanted to replace them with smaller scale furniture. The pandemic goofed that up as many stores and manufacturers closed down temporarily (some permanently). Now that they’re open again, there are supply chain problems so there are delivery dates out (sometimes way out) in the future.

Now there’s another stumbling block. My husband doesn’t want to give up his recliner. I should point out that our recliners are over 20 years olds, well made and still very comfy. Unfortunately they are still very LARGE. I’m willing to give up mine for a smaller model. But he has his worn to just the way he likes it, and he doesn’t want to give it up.

I get it. I’m not thrilled about it, but I get it. If you’ve ever seen the sitcom “Frasier,” you know that Frasier’s luxury condo contained a very hip modern set of furniture plus his father’s old, duct-tape-repaired recliner. His dad didn’t want to give up his chair either.

Since I haven’t been able to find a small sofa I really like anyways, I’ve decided to give up the hunt for now. One of those recliners will break at some point, and then we can start the furniture hunt again.

The Furniture Hunt Continues

By Claire Posted in downsizing, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , ,

I’m back on the hunt for new, smaller-scale furniture for our living room. So far, it hasn’t been easy.

One problem is that there are still so many huge overstuffed pieces of furniture for sale out there. That’s not for anyone with a small house.

Of the sofas that aren’t huge and overstuffed, many are quite long. Again, that won’t work in our 12’ X 16’ living room. Although I’ve noticed while looking inside local homes for sale on Realtor.com (a habit I can’t seem to break) that many people with homes like ours buy a large overstuffed sectional, fill the room with it, hang a huge television on the facing wall and put a floor lamp near the sectional and call it a day. That’s not for us.

I’ve discovered that websites like Wayfair.com and Overstock.com offer filters so that you can weed out the wrong sizes and styles while wading through literally thousands of sofas and sectionals. That’s very convenient; the problem is that we haven’t seen a sofa we really like, and I suspect that, while affordable, the quality isn’t there and most won’t last very long.

But we’re getting closer. We just visited a higher-end furniture store with sturdier furniture. It’s not inexpensive, but we’re willing to pay for quality. Unfortunately, the colors and fabric available now aren’t very appealing to us. But we’ll keep looking.

We’re also looking for modest-sized chairs and a small stand for our television that will hide our DVDs and our DVD player. This appears to be another challenge: there are so many huge televisions out there that most stands are nearly as wide as the wall we want to put one on.

Redoing the living room is going to take longer than I thought.

The Furniture Hunt Begins

By Claire Posted in downsizing, Personal, Small-House Living Tagged , , ,

I know I said I wouldn’t start looking for smaller scale furniture right away, but apparently, I lied. Today, I couldn’t resist the temptation to take a peek into one furniture store that I have to drive past to get groceries.

Oh my gosh. Last time, I noted that there are tons of small sofas for sale online. Well, there were none in this store. Only ginormous sofas. Even the loveseats were big. And I saw a sectional sofa that was so long in both directions that it would not fit in our living room unless we let it completely block the front door.

I can see this is going to be harder than I thought. Many of the small sofas I saw online were not of the highest quality. They often call them apartment sofas, I suppose because people use them to fit into apartments, which tend to be on the small side. But such people often move frequently so they aren’t looking for quality, long-lasting furniture. However, I am.

With the Christmas tree up, we’re more cramped in the living room than usual. This has only increased my motivation to find good-quality, small-scale furniture for our living room. However, I suspect this might take a while.