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.