The Full Suburban: Couch catastrophe has happy and local conclusion

I know that worry regarding the Ditto Couch Situation that I documented in a recent column has been keeping many of you up at night. So, in an effort to ease your anxiety and help you get some much-needed shut-eye, I figured I should share an update.

You’ll recall the sad saga of how Logan and I bought a sectional online last September, only to learn that the wait time for receiving it was a staggering six months. We pressed on, knowing that, in the end, this perfect sectional would be worth the wait. Well, you know what they say: you make your plans and then the Internet laughs.

And laugh it did. The online furniture company let us know in January that it was going bankrupt and may or may not be able to fulfill our order (“Check back on Feb. 1! No, 10! Actually, the final, we’re-not-kidding-around deadline for telling our customers what is up with their orders is Feb. 17! For reals this time!”)

A couple weeks ago we got the final word: They’d never even started production on our couch in the first place, and they sure as heck weren’t starting now. We flopped down on our uncomfortable decade-old couches in defeat, and I wrote all about it for this column as therapy.

“Spokane and Spokane Valley have about a gazillion furniture stores with delivery within days,” wrote one faithful reader named Karen. “Just sayin’.”

“I know, I know, but I have a distinctive style,” I reasoned in my mind. “And our living room is kind of weirdly proportioned. There’s no way we’re going to walk into a furniture store in Spokane Valley and just find exactly what we want.”

But desperation does funny things to a person. After a few more days of sitting on our couch/love seat/fireplace hearth combo, I decided that enough was enough.

“We’re going furniture shopping this weekend if it’s the last thing we do,” I told Logan, who had never heard a worse sentence in his entire life. A couple days later, we started hitting up the furniture stores of Spokane.

It didn’t take long before we walked into a store that had a large gray sectional sitting right at the front of the showroom. I stopped in my tracks and sat down.

“This one’s on sale,” an attentive salesman said as he walked over to us, probably smelling our desperation. “It’s covered in really soft but durable outdoor fabric that’s good for people with kids and pets. It’s modular, so we can add or take away pieces to fit your room. And we have it in stock right now.”

You know that feeling you get, like when your future spouse proposes to you, or the girl making the Blizzards at Dairy Queen accidentally scoops you a few too many peanut butter cups – that feeling that something is just meant to be? That’s how I felt when I saw this couch.

“I want it,” I said to an astonished Logan, who expected a much more drawn-out process.

“Is this even a style you like?” he asked.

“Close enough,” I replied.

“Do you think it’s comfortable?” he continued.

“It’s light years better than the couches we have now,” I said. “Plus, did you hear those two magic words? ‘In stock.’ ”

We discussed it probably longer than we needed to, but in the end, my gut reaction was right. We bought the couch.

Six days later, it was delivered to our house and set up in our living room by two friendly delivery workers. And it has transformed the way we live. The room that no one ever wanted to hang out in because it was Uncomfortable Couch Central is now the hub of the house.

My two oldest boys have taken to sitting on the couch and strumming tunes on their guitars. Hyrum has claimed the corner seat as his “cozy reading spot” and will happily sit there for an hour with a blanket and a book. Even I wandered out there the other day to sit down and fold laundry. When I was done, it was so comfortable that I just sat back and fell asleep for five minutes. Things like this never used to happen.

It might have taken a nudge from reader Karen to get me to realize it, but it turns out that shopping local was what I needed all along. Spokane: 1. Internet: 0. Who’s laughing now?

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.