Beth failed to notice anything particularly unusual about this, which shows how crazed a person can become when she is desperate to get rid of a sectional sofa.
“Yes,” she said. “Now, the sofa ...”
“Are they brown?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But about the ...”
“Do they smell bad?” he asked.
At this point Beth, even in her furniture-induced derangement, realized that this person was not a Hot Prospect, and she got off the phone. Eventually she sold the sofa, so it wasn’t such a bad experience after all, though it probably would have been easier and more relaxing if we had just gone out into the backyard and set fire to a small pile of hundred-dollar bills.
Of course there is a way to obtain nice furniture without the frustration and high cost of buying it new, provided you are willing to put in a few hours of honest “elbow grease” and possibly suffer permanent disfigurement. I am referring, of course, to the time-honored Thrifty Homeowner art of ...
Refinishing Furniture
No doubt you have at one time or another visited the home of people who have a number of nice older wooden pieces, and you have said something complimentary, and your hosts said something like: “Oh, thank you, we bought them all for a total of $147.50 at garage sales and refinished them ourselves in the garage and now they are worth, we conservatively estimate, nine million dollars.” They are lying, of course. They stole all this stuff from the Museum of Nice Old Wood Furniture. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that at some point you will get the notion that you can have nice furniture via the refinishing method, so you might as well know the correct procedure:
1. You go to a garage sale and you find a bureau covered with hideously ugly orange paint.
2. You call your spouse over, and you say, in a quiet voice so the garage sale person can’t overhear you: “Look at this! You know what this is, under this paint? This is (CHOOSE ONE): ... solid oak!” solid bird’s-eye maple!” ... solid walnut!” ... solid oaken maple eye of walnut!” (It makes no difference what fine hardwood you claim the bureau is made of, because it will forever remain an elusive dream that you never actually lay eyes on, similar to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.)