Goodbye Sofa

Updated at the Bottom

The sofa in our basement is called the asscracker.  It’s a sectional, but we’ve put together unrelated sections, which means that there is a strange metal bar that runs down one of the grooves between cushions.  People who do not know about our affectionate nickname for the sofa have plopped down on said metal bar and gotten a sore bum.  Hence the name, asscracker.

We inherited asscracker because… well… this is a long story.  You may want to get a cup of coffee.  And we should probably begin with ugly couch.

Ugly couch is a different sofa: one that does not harm people’s bums insomuch as it harms people’s eyes and sense of taste.  It’s ugly; a hideous tan, the colour of dried urine.  We didn’t realize how ugly this sofa was when we purchased it early in our relationship.  All we knew was that it fulfilled our two requirements: (1) hid a sofa bed for guests and (2) was the most inexpensive piece of furniture in the store.

Over the years, as we sat on other people’s sofas, we wished that we had made a different choice.  We weren’t really using the sofa bed feature, and while it was a decently-made piece of furniture, it likely had been sold at such a low price because no one else wanted a sofa the colour of a urine stain.

When we moved into our current house, we made ourselves a little grownup promise.  We were adults now, and we were going to take our hard-earned money to the store and splurge on a new sofa.  The current sofa — ugly couch — would be moved into the basement’s rumpus room.

But then we moved into the house and the movers could not get ugly couch down the stairs.  They tried for a long time to turn it in various directions, but they couldn’t make it past a turn in the stairs.  Ugly couch was left in our living room.  It didn’t make sense to buy a nice, new sofa for the rumpus room.  My parents donated asscracker, which had been in storage.  We took three unconnected pieces because I liked them the most and I didn’t know about the metal bar until they had gotten rid of the other sections.

So that’s how we ended up with two piece of furniture that we don’t like for the last fifteen or so years.

A perfect storm of a bathroom renovation (which makes you look critically at everything else in your house) and a lot of articles about minimalism has made me think that it’s time to say goodbye to ugly couch.  We could get a simple IKEA sofa for the basement — something with a bed so guests could use it despite the fact that no one has used the sofa bed in the living room in the past twelve years.  And we could get the sofa of our dreams for the living room.  I don’t actually have a sofa of my dreams, but you know what I mean: something that is not ugly couch.

But here’s the thing: the ugly couch sparks as much joy as it sucks away.  It’s a sofa with a story: how we ended up with ugly couch and not the couch-not-taken (yes, there was a third couch I left out of this story) was part of our first fight as a couple.  That couch has known us from the very beginning of our engagement.  When we first got it, we used to take trips to our living room and sleep (or, really not sleep because it was so uncomfortable) on the sofa bed for a change of pace.  The sofa features heavily in early baby pictures, when we’d prop up the twins and pretend they could sit up on their own.

So first I need to talk a sibling into taking custody of ugly couch.  I need to have visitation rights and be able to go back to ugly couch and bask in its tan-ness.  I need to sleep on its uncomfortable sofa bed and say, “sofa beds really are an excellent idea.”  If that can happen, I can let my sofa-that-sparks-joy live somewhere else.  If not, I don’t know, it passes the Konmari test so I’m at an impasse.

Asscracker, on the other hand… totally fine getting rid of that one in a hot second.

Update:

The twins read this post and informed me that the proper name of the sofa is “Assbreaker.”  They wanted this corrected.  So I’m correcting it.