It's a Good Thing Cats Are Cute

We own three sofas, we have two rooms in need of a couch, and yet we have no couches that are actually presentable as grown-up furniture that one might encounter in a grown-up house.

I will elaborate:

Sofa 1: Part of an early conversation-pit-style couch-and-love-seat set in veridian green velvet with pink highlights that screams 1990 louder than MC Hammer singing U Can't Touch This. It's still in remarkably good shape on account of the fact that I have a slight phobia of sinking into gooey couch cushions, thus it has had its cushion foam replaced twice, the last time with foam dense enough to use as space shuttle tiles. It is comfortable, ugly, and moderately ruined by the damn cat using it as a scratching post. We tried to keep the cat away. We gave her several of her own scratching posts, which she delighted in never, ever touching. She would rather lay into the velvet as deep as her claws would go, and pull out long strands of former couch.

Coco on the Hammer couch.

Sofa 2: Once it was clear that the green couch set was out of date and on its way to cat-scratch hell, we found a couch at Dania. It was as firm as Danishly possible, widened out at one end to be at once hip and yet also deep enough to fit two sets of middle-aged hips. The cat set herself the task of destroying it at night while we were asleep. One day we had an avant-garde piece of living room art, and the next day we woke up to a garage-sale markdown. The first couch was looking dated so we couldn't really blame her for that one, but now this cat just cost us fifteen hundred bucks. We tried to take it to an upholsterer once. He gave us an estimate to fix it of about how much we paid for it, and promptly went out of business. I keep trying to think of ways to mask the damage, but I'm afraid of making it look worse and then having to explain the mess to the guy at Goodwill when I drop it off.

Sofa 3: Okay, one more try. This time we are living in a house with a latter-day craftsman-style theme, so we come home with a craftsman-style couch with oak arms and legs that the cat cannot sink her claws into. Brilliant. Except that the couch is nearly as comfortable as trying to sleep across three chairs in the airport.

Now we have a family room, a living room, and a sun (read dog) room, and we keep cycling these misfit couches around the house, waiting for each of them to become something they are not - either pretty, whole, or comfortable, and all three are failing.

We really should drop the whole lot off at Goodwill and try again, but that would entail spending money we promised to someone else - mainly the electric company, but that's another story involving a furnace from another time when electricity was cheap and it seemed like a good idea to heat a high-ceilinged, attic-less house with a jumbo-sized hair dryer.

I'm going to go move the furniture around some more. It will help me stay warm.