The Gaming Den

Hercules' 13th labor was buying furniture. But let's start at the beginning.

I've been living mostly off of plastic patio furniture for the last eight months. The guys have it together: easy to assemble (where assembly required), always fits in the car, washable, affordable. However, it is plastic, which is just a kind of frozen gasoline, and tends to bend alarmingly whenever any pressure is applied. Say, by leaning against the back of a chair.

Don't get me wrong, I have your bare-essentials bed setup - frame, boxspring, mattress - and a couple nice little stools and footrests, but the only real furniture in my house are five identical bookshelves. So yesterday I decided to go chair-shopping.

This was a mistake. Yesterday was Sunday, and nine out of ten furniture stores are closed on Sundays. The remainder are the ovepriced, understocked, uncultured assholes of the furniture mob, who have you by the balls and know it. So I spent a gallon or two of gas driving all over town - even to the thrift stores and antique/junk stores - and came away empty-handed.

Now, keep in mind a couple things - I knew exactly what I wanted. A small chair, preferably leather but in no fucking circumstances cloth, with a back to it I could lean against. Something I could transport myself instead of getting delivered, and ideally something I didn't have to assemble. Also, in my innocence, I imagined such a chair would be relatively inexpensive - under $100 was my ideal budget.

Oh my fuck, what the fuck is wrong with the furniture industry? It's not just that their prices were outrageous, but the furniture is so fucking ugly and so much of it is fucking useless for regular day-to-day tasks. I walked into a showroom in the seediest fucking stripmall in town and they had a small herd of cows' worth of overstuffed leather chairs, each one marked as a cool grand a piece. $1000! For a thousand bucks, I should be able to afford a decent couch, or at least a loveseat and the dealer throws in a couple barstools.

So I left shopping that day with my hopes, aspirations, and illusions shattered. And I still don't know why all that shit is as expensive as it is. For starters, so many of the chairs are cloth. Maybe this is me - I've never had kids, but I've been a child, and I've babysat my four bitching nieces and my incontinent grandfather, and cloth is right fucking out for me. It doesn't last, it's impossible to clean once dirty, and you have no hope of getting rid of it unless you just put it to the curb and hope the garbage-pickers grab it. And so much of the furniture is ugly, terrible, uninspired shit. I don't necessarily want to come home to an art deco future of polished aluminum and white-washed chrome, but neither do want crappy wood-veneered particleboard shaped like the shit my parents bought back in the 70s, a crappy sixth-generation copy of my grandparent's furniture knocked together by some slave labor in China from Brazilian hardwood, or absolutely anything that I could potentially see in the fucking cubicleville that I call work.

I had this problem when buying bookshelves, too. I really really wanted a set of barrister's bookcases, the real thing - actual mobile furniture, the kind of shit that was Ikea-before-Ikea (Ghost, I wish there was an Ikea, even if I hate assembling shit) - and instead the best you can find along those lines are things made to sort of look like them. How shitty is it when crappy furniture is made, no designed specifically to make it look like some other, better piece of furniture? Like there should be a functional drawer there, but there's not. It's just a carving of a drawer with a handle glued to it. What the fuck is that? It's like those fucking jackets that have what look like pockets but are not actually pockets.

Fuck.

So after work today, I drove around to the now-open furniture stores. Again, the prices overwhelmed me and the selection underwhelmed me. Worse, I really couldn't find what I was looking for. Nobody had, say, a big pile of miscellaneous chairs from broken dinette sets in a clearance pile. There were a couple really nice leather office chairs - the type you don't see anymore because nobody has a home office that can afford that sort of thing, and why the fuck would that be selling it in his shithole town anyway? - but they wanted $500 and up for that sort of thing. Mahogany, the tag said. Fuck off, I said, it's stained.

So after a couple of the bigger places turned out to be terrible, I tried a couple of the smaller places. I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for at that point, but I knew it when I saw it. I pulled into the parking lot of a zombie mall and walked into a store advertising Discount Office Furniture.

Now, a zombie mall is a mall - the big, indoor American shopping experience - that has died, but there are still stores there. So most of it is abandoned, there's few people walking around on the inside, none of the "anchors" open to the inside, because they just treat it as a big strip mall. Everything is run down, but the leases are cheap and you can get a lot of space, so it's ideal for discount warehouse joints. Such it was with these guys.

There were three people inside, all classic good ol' boys. One made as if to get up when I came in, but I nodded at him and he sat back down. This is actually a good thing. Most furniture salespeople work on commission, and they are terrible rat bastards worse than cars salespeople or real estate salespeople, because...I don't know. Maybe the margins are smaller, and they're more desperate, but they know even less about what they're selling and more eager to talk money. Bastards.

But this place, it was basically a warehouse filled with office shit from every other office store and dot-com that had failed in the last ten years or more. So while there was nice and new office furniture - some very nice - there was also a vast majority that was nicked, scuffed, had a wobbly leg, or was perfectly functional but a little fugly, but not so fugly you wouldn't take it home and sit on it because it was also much more reasonably priced. I spent at twenty minutes in the store, narrowed it down to two chairs, and bought one of them for $105 after taxes.

Getting it in the car was a slightly more perilous and difficult endeavor, and took another twenty minutes. There was a time last Christmas when I had bought my mother a small table-and-stools set, and attempted to get it home in the car, but it just wouldn't fit. So I abandoned it in the parking lot for a few minutes to get tools with which to disassemble it, reasoning that I could put it back together later. Long story short, I ended up destroying the table and presenting mom with a nice pair of stools. I was afraid this might be a similar situation, but the good ol' boy designated to help me and I managed to wedge it in to the passenger-side seat upside-down - which meant that I couldn't use the parking break or any of the higher gears, but I got the chair back to the house in one piece. (Why is it that no-one designing furniture ever gives any fucking though to moving this shit? I don't expect to fit a bedroom set in my four-door sedan, but I don't think a single non-lounger chair should be a fucking issue.)

So now I sit. In my chair. Black faux-leather, but an actual fucking chair I can lean back in. A simple pleasure.

You know, Ikea has a website... as does Cost Plus/World market, I'm not sure if you'd be able to find what you're looking for at the latter, but you could, or should, certainly be able to find something that'd work.

A damn fine read for a story about buying a chair.

The last chair I bought was from a Church Bazaar for like $15


Before I found that beauty I had gone as far as drawing up schematics, pricing lumber, a mitre saw, sanders and various fasteners. Even assuming that I would outright ruin half my supplies with my zero experience in furniture making, and valuing my own time at twice what my job paid me, it looked like I would save money building my own chair. The overall expenditure would be similar, but I'd have a spiffy handmade chair AND a set of new woodworking and upholstery tools.

If you're going to buy furniture, you might as well get some from a flea market, yard sale, or similar. Yard sales are tougher, because people have an inflated idea of the value of their stuff, but when you're desperate enough you'll sell for whatever you can reasonably get.

Generally, I don't pay more than $20 for a chair, usually $5 or $10, nice chairs, too, recliners sometimes.

As for moving to stuff, in my experience you can never have enough rope. It's amazing what you can do with a few sturdy knots.

If you're going to get a chair, don't just get a chair, get a CHAIR.

Yeah, furniture, good enough furniture, is fucking expensive . .
I spent about 400€ on the office chair i am sitting in right now, at home . .
Because the other crap still costs about 150€ and will break down in a year tops.
A good Desk? Similar priced. A bed? Yep, you pay 500€ for one in my size. And then about the same for a good mattress . .
This is mostly because they know that you probably won't ever buy anything like that again, because it's usually made to last for some years and thus not needed . .

@Duke:
That chair would give me nightmares, both from the looks of having a Xenomorph in my dark room and from the price it would cost . .

When my ex's parents bought her a new bed, after she moved out of her grandparents' house back in with them, they got her some piece of crap from Ikea, that, as much as I thought so before, am now convinced was chosen to try to prevent sex in it. I just checked the price of it on Ikea's website, and they actually bought the more expensive, flexible, cannot hold two peoples' weight unless they spread the weight out, slats, rather than the thicker, cheaper, actually usable slats. But yeah, if you want cheap, you hit Ikea, their website, or a flea market/tag sale.

Ancient History wrote:Most furniture salespeople work on commission, and they are terrible rat bastards worse than cars salespeople or real estate salespeople, because...I don't know.

I hate salesmen so much. They're like rapists -- they don't understand that "no" means no.

Furniture is one of those things I can't bring myself to buy online, and not just because there are twenty-something furniture stores within a dozen miles. Furniture is just one of those things I want a tangible feel of, to assess weight, size, dimensions, material, whether or not I need to factor in the beer required to get someone to help me move it, etc. Plus, barring some Craigslist syzygy you're getting it delivered (delivery hassles!) and probably have to assemble it yourself (two for two!)

Buying furniture at flea markets and yard sales, the Cloth Rule applies double - and you also have to worry about actual insect infestations, which means you're pretty much down to pure wooden furniture and prey there aren't any termites. Rare, I know, but...well, I've experienced a few things. You only need to sit down and have the bench collapse into a pile of crawling sawdust once.

I haven't actually bought any furniture in a while, but when we were looking, I did notice that the furniture store in the heavily Eastern European neighborhood had some crazy stuff at good deals. So there's another option. If you have a Little Odessa in your town.

Ancient History wrote: Buying furniture at flea markets and yard sales, the Cloth Rule applies double - and you also have to worry about actual insect infestations, which means you're pretty much down to pure wooden furniture and prey there aren't any termites. Rare, I know, but...well, I've experienced a few things. You only need to sit down and have the bench collapse into a pile of crawling sawdust once.

I've never had that problem. Currently, at least where I live, the used merchandise market is a buyers market. People just throw away crap that's damaged because they can't sell it. Most of the stuff I find is either decent quality antiques or like new with perhaps some minor scuffs on the wood.

That's mostly the result is extremely low demand driving down prices and forcing shoddy goods out. Because people don't have all that much disposable income, you're lucky to sell a piece of furniture for 10% actual value. A shitty economy does have some advantages, I guess.

I'm kind of curious whether or not you wandered into a Restoration Hardware at your mention of $1000 chairs.

I have family that owns a country auction nearby, and I've been using them for cheap deals on great furniture. I furnished my entire apartment in decent to high quality furniture for about $600. I love my antique drafting table, which is currently being used as a desk.

Amish furniture is pretty great too, if you have it available. It's still expensive, but you actually get something good for it.

Ancient History - Ess says that's the best story about furniture shopping that he's heard in a while.



I buy a goodly amount of used furniture at our government surplus warehouse. It's cheap, it's durable, and it's paintable.

My favorite acquisition is an oak library shelving cart for $15. Not only does it hold a ton of books, but I can move it without having to take the books off the shelf because it's on wheels.

woot Zombie Sales Spam!

That was actually almost a successful spam bot, it's just slightly too incoherent