Liquid Nonsense

I know I've had something of a hiatus from my blog over the last few weeks...trust me, I've been occupied with stuff. Here's a pretty great story though from yesterday.

So, several weeks ago I wandered into an Arizona Leather Company store and decided to check out what they had. Considering that they make some pretty premium furniture, I definitely was not anticipating purchasing something. After wandering around the store for a few minutes a really friendly guy helped me out and gave me the quick rundown of the showroom's layout and what was where. He then asked if their special had brought me in. Special? Apparently they were having a two week truck load sale of all their furniture as long as you purchased a specific type of leather on it. This piqued my interest because A) I needed a couch, B) their furniture is awesome, and C) dead cow hide is really comfortable.

How awesome of a sale was it? Sofas were $800 off and sectionals were up to $2,400 off...so, enough to entice me. I found one that I absolutely loved that was available in their Mesa leather with Navajo Butter as the color, thus it qualified for a $1200 discount making it reasonable. I went ahead and put a deposit down so I could have it delivered, only to find out that all their furniture is custom made to specifications, so I got to pick out which was the long side of the sectional, and which was the short, etc. The whole process takes six weeks from order to delivery.

--- Fast forward to delivery date ---

I take the afternoon off of work to receive my frickin' awesome new sectional. The delivery guys show up and I inform them that I'd like the couch in my upstairs entertainment room. The guy at the store told me that as long as I have standard sized door frames, which I do, that it wouldn't be a problem. They look at the stairs and have some serious qualms about whether or not my gigantar sectional is going to get upstairs.

They try the long piece first...lo and behold there is a small spot in my ceiling where it's about a foot lower than the rest of the house... which in turn means that my ceiling is about 3 inches too low at the foot of the stairs to stand it up. The corner is also too sharp for them to angle it in correctly.... fuck.

Boss-man is called and informed that they can't get the long piece up. They tell me that I can have a technician (yes, "technician" for furniture) come out and remove the arms and they can possibly squeeze it up there at my expense. Not so good. My other option is to have the couch sent back to California and have it re-segmented in the middle to make it a four-piece sectional. Not so good again. After a few moments of chatting they load it back onto the truck to store it in the warehouse so we can figure out what to do.

Ten minutes after they leave I get a call. They want to try and get the smaller eight foot segment upstairs, because if that gets up there they know for sure the other piece will because it happens to be eight feet without the arms. I let them back in and once again they start hauling stuff upstairs. This time they get to the second floor landing before they discover there isn't enough room to maneuver the couch to actually get it through the door. Double fuck.

The sectional comes BACK downstairs again. This time we reach the realization that the couch can't be re-segmented (because of additional factors) and even removing the arms will most likely be insufficient. I decide to have them set it up downstairs so I can at least enjoy it while we come to some kind of decision.

After a few hours I realize that my color choices go really well together downstairs. Now I'm considering just keeping it downstairs and officially making my upstairs couch the official downstairs couch.


I have to admit that I am considering a different Arizona Leather couch for upstairs...one much smaller that I know will easily navigate my narrow stairs. Either way, now I feel better about inviting people over since I have somewhere for them to sit.