The Couch

We had a small collection of furniture when we moved from the condo to the house. There was the leather couch, an office desk and chair, some plastic kitchen stools, the television set with the electric fireplace, and two mattresses (one of which unfortunately could not fit its boxspring up the stairs). The rest of the house, we had to furnish from scratch.

Nick was especially excited about the concept of having a formal living room, complete with a wood-burning fireplace. “You got to design the rest of the house,” he said to me, “so I want to pick the furniture in the living room.” Okay, fair point. I suppose that we could collaborate on picking out the couch for the living room. As so to this end, we began looking at a couple of places to see what was out there.

Everything at Ethan Allen was sized for a McMansion and nothing fit in our space. Also, I wanted to be able to see the product in person before committing to such a prominent feature, so we crossed Article off from the list. After visiting a few more stores, the front runners were BoConcept and the Nightmare Store (Nick didn’t want us getting hate mail from the internet, so I decided on an alias). Both offered modern customizable furniture at similar price points with slightly different color and fabric selections. We decided to go with the Nightmare Store for their shade of dark navy (or as Nick sees it, “black”) with an estimated delivery timeline of November 2021. We placed the order on July 2.

In late October, I began to follow up with the store manager to find out when we could schedule our delivery date. Then the original estimated time of arrival had passed without any news. After many phone calls and emails, the store manager told us that there had been a delay and set a new estimated delivery timeline of early December 2021. The new timeline also comes and goes with our couch nowhere to be found.

Eventually, the problem was escalated to the store owner, who tells us that there was a miscommunication with their manufacturer who, a) stopped taking custom orders altogether, and b) had not started on ours. Finally losing my cool, I had to threaten to cancel in order to get somewhere. The whole point of waiting 20+ weeks was so that we could customize our couch!

Fortunately, by either twisting arms or calling favors along the supply chain, the store owner made the stars align and the couch was delivered in mid-December, just in time for us to host a small Christmas get-together. We love the color, fit, and functionality of the couch, and are so grateful that we did not have to order what Nick declared was the ‘sinfully ugly’ backup. But man, what a process it was to get there.

Product 10/10. Service 3/10.