Under the Couch Where My Shiny Stuff is...

Meanwhile, our coffee table broke. I'd bought it shortly after moving out on my own in a year starting with a 1, so we've long since pondered replacing it because its surface has gotten scruffy and some of the larger pieces of wood have warped a bit. Some years back a guest leaned on it at a bad angle and one leg was then attached less well than it ought, and then Spouse accidentally pushed on its surface just wrong such that the whole thing listed to one side - still somewhat usable, but no longer easily moved on its casters and definitely quite crooked.

It's a uniquely useful coffee table - a lift top so we can dine atop it, casters to easily shift it about, a shelf on the bottom to keep essentials like a basket of remotes and random handy stuff like my sewing kit since TV-watching is when I mend things... Of course we didn't want to lose the features, an in our casual inquiries over the years we hadn't spotted anything that had them all, but how hard could it be to find something similar if we really put our mind to it?

But first, we should try to see if we can fix it. We flipped it, but between the awkward attachment points and the warped wood in short order we admitted defeat - this called for skills and tools that we did not have on hand.

In examining the patient I descended to the floor, and a muscle in my lower back decided that I shouldn't have done that and I will not be getting up now, thank you very much. So, picture the first several weeks of this narrative me groaning about with my stick as my cranky knee and my cranky back disagreed on how to compensate for each other. I could stand almost comfortably, I could sit if I kept my back straight, but shifting between these two states required planning, effort and pain. Laying down seemed safe so long as I didn't try to move at all. I'm much much better now.

We walked (or in my case limped) into every furniture store in our town. Some stores admitted defeat immediately. Some stores showed us the one thing that fit all but one criteria. Bob's had something that checked all the checkboxes, but had a belt of metal around its legs at shin-kicking height, which added "rounded corners without added bruise-maker features" to the requirement list. Ashley had something that checked all the checkboxes, so despite being absolutely the wrong color of wood to go with anything else in our house, it entered our contender list. LaZBoy had something that checked all the checkboxes and didn't look too ugly, but pricier than anything else we've seen. Very well, then, we mapped every furniture store in Rockville which has a lot of them. Nothing useful. Back to LaZBoy, then, confirming that it's the best we can do, checking availability... and being told that it can be ours in mere 4-6 weeks. With a mandatory delivery fee on top.

My friends buy furniture on Wayfair, thought I, why don't I try to see what I can find there. It was a little awkward, because its search lumps "casters" and "lift top" into the same criteria-set and will give you pieces with either if you try to ask for both. No worries, we'll search for casters because there are fewer of them and Ctrl-F "lift" on item names. This yielded, among many other things none of which were quite right, the LaZBoy table - not just its clone, but literally the same product complete with LaZBoy product name in its assembly instruction PDF. It would ship for free in 3 days! It had no restocking fee beyond paying reverse shipping!

A few days after it arrived I had gained some limited ability to bend and lift things again, so we put it together. Ikea it wasn't - the instructions were sparse and in one step self-contradictory, as one was to insert screws without tightening them all the way, attach a cover, and then tighten the screws in the now no longer accessible space. (Spouse spent a half-hour on hold with the help line who cleared him to just go ahead and tighten them before attaching the cover.) It was heavy, and some parts needed to be suspended awkwardly to attach other parts: for one step it was useful to make the table straddle the old coffee table perpendicularly, and for another I loaded the shelf with a third of my leather-bound complete Agatha Christie collection to support the top in the right spot to attach it to the base and legs. Finally it was assembled. We gleefully rolled it to the couch, sat down and lifted the top...

And discovered that this table pre-supposed a much taller couch, and instead of lifting to a comfortable dining height this one was a good 5" taller. We attempted to eat a meal on stacked cushions with an optimistic refrain of "we can get used to this, can't we,", and then we looked at each other, and Spouse went to look up return information.

Given the weight of the parts, disassembling it was as awkward as assembling, but by then we'd figured out the tricks and workarounds.

Onward to another round of the nearby stores, then, and every store in about 20 mile radius, now with one more requirement: lifted height of about 2'. Which of course nobody documents. The almost-good Ashley turned out to be 3-4" more than our ideal. (We found several resellers who'd sell it to us for about 2/3 of the actual brand name store.) No luck if we wanted it all, though there were some possibilities cheap enough that we might compromise.

After some weeks of this nonsense Spouse wondered if it may be repaired. Sure enough, furniture repair still exists, and we contacted several of them. One responded to the contact form within a day. We gave the others 24 hours to do likewise, and when they didn't, we responded back and we were offered a repair visit the same day. Two hours and about a third of the Wayfair cost of the LaZBoy later, we had a functioning (and slightly better reinforced) table - for my future self's reference courtesy of Freelance Finishing.