Time to go shopping...

Sometimes you get the urge to buy new piece of furniture because you look around and realize you haven’t changed your décor since the original Brady Bunch debut. What HGTV is showing as retro reproductions is the real McCoy in your house.

Or maybe you went on some strange color spree a few years back and did everything – furniture, curtains, walls and carpeting – all in fuchsia. Now you feel like you’re living inside a bubble gum bubble.

The real sign of needing furniture, though, is when it’s worn out. I’m not talking about a bit of worn fabric. I’m talking about having a brick propped under one end of the sofa or an end table nailed back together to keep it standing. Or having a piece collapse under you. In my family’s case, my husband sat down to relax in his old recliner and got thrown into a backwards flip onto the floor. He was in such shock, he declared it was time to do the unthinkable – spend money on new stuff.

So off to the furniture store I went, thinking I could easily buy a new recliner and be done with it… until I got there. Could we replace just one piece of furniture? As I faced rooms full of gorgeous new stuff, I was struck by the need to redo the entire room. After all, how could I match something new to the old sofa? And even if I could, there’s the change factor, a woman’s nesting urge to refurbish her surroundings. Our coffee table and rocking chair are leftovers from college days. Our television is a remarkable 21 years old, slightly fuzzy, but still running. The end tables have seen better days. Our stereo and cabinet are so old they still hold a turntable and albums. I stood in the store hearing the bong, bong, bong of buy, Buy, BUY!

The buying eyes didn’t end at the living room sets. There were whole new departments to venture into. Bedroom suits. Couldn’t we have a new one of those? And a larger dining room table!

As I went from store to store, I saw a wide array of styles… curved sofas with beautiful fabrics, seats with cup holders, sofas with radios, tables that flipped down, foot stools that flip up, a camouflage chair (to sit in while hunting those dead deer heads hanging on the wall?), and for the diehard couch potato a coffee table that rises into a TV tray. But the most amazing piece of furniture was at Farmers Furniture – the ultimate recliner. This recliner will do everything except fetch a beer out of the fridge. It comes with a control that may require a college education, or the technical mind of a modern day 4-year-old, to operate. This recliner not only massages, it massages according to specific body part and chosen intensity, and it will heat up to a desired temperature.

I was really tempted to buy that recliner except I was afraid once I sat in it I might never get up again. If my husband flaked out in it after work and turned on the massage, he might not need me anymore. The poodles would master the control just to give it a try while we’re out of the house, and next thing you know they’d be claiming rights to the TV remote, too, and arguing about whether or not they can stay up late to watch Lassie. To keep the kids from fighting over it, we’d have to chunk the sofa and buy six recliners. Then we could all sit down in unison and say, “One, two, three, go!” and all flip back, ready for take off… to TV land or sleep?

Ah, well, the search goes on. In the meantime, my husband is getting pretty good at doing back flips from the recliner and landing on his feet. If it takes me much longer to find a new chair, he may be a gymnastic contender for the next Olympics.