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So far, this has to be one of my favorite giveaways. Who wants yet another book about money when you could have a postmodern bean bag chair? Last week, I reviewed the Sumo Lounge Omni chair and Otto foot rest.
As the review explains, the chair is a lot nicer than I expected. Currently, I am keeping the Omni in the “bed” position for relaxing while blogging.
Sumo Lounge agreed to give away an Omni chair valued at $150 to a lucky Consumerism Commentary reader. It will be delivered by FedEx directly to the winner’s door. Not only that, but the winner can choose the color. I was sent the fiery red, and I like it, but the other colors, like tangerine, platinum, funky brown, and lime green, look great from the pictures.
Here are the instructions for the giveaway.
In order to enter the contest, you must comment on this post below, leaving your valid e-mail address. As I’ve mentioned, I will keep your e-mail address private, but I need a way to contact the winner. The comment should include something about furniture, such as an entertaining story about how you acquired furniture in your first apartment.
I really like this stuff, and this is a contest definitely worth your time. The winner will be chosen randomly, and the odds of winning depend on the number of commenters. I would hope that this attracts strong interest, as I’m quite impressed with what they’ve sent me.
The giveaway will be closed to new entries at 11:59 PM Eastern time on Tuesday, October 23. The winner will be notified by email and expected to respond within 48 hours. Subscribe to the Consumerism Commentary RSS feed to receive updates.
Update [10/17, 12:00 pm]: If you tried to place a comment on Consumerism Commentary in the last twelve hours, I did not receive your comment. You would have received an error message after submitting your message. The problem has been fixed, so please try again.
Update [10/24, 12:00 am]: The winner has been selected and notified. Thanks to everyone who visited; I hope new visitors are sticking around.
Furniture was always supplied in the dorms I stayed at, so I never had to purchase my own while at school.
My wife painted a backgammon design on my old Ikea coffee table and it really added new life to it. The design looks real professional. This beenbad furniture would be great using with this table as I could sit at a decent level to use the table as a dinner table. We live in a small NYC apartment, so this would be great.
I’m still using several tables and bookshelves that my dad built when I graduated from college 15 years ago.
I brought my parent’s black naugahyde couch, chair, and ottoman to our first house. We eventually sold the set for $50. My wife really didn’t care how many naugas were skinned to cover those pieces of furniture.
Whoops, I meant parents’. I have two.
Up until just a few months ago, I had pretty much bought nearly all the furniture in my house off of craigslist. There’s a lot of really bad stuff on there (stuff that should probably be thrown away), but I came away with quite a few gems, including my best find: a nearly brand new IKEA coffee table for about 1/3 of the original price about 2 weeks after I saw it at the store and nearly bought it.
Each time we move courtesy the military we lose a little more furniture. The first move, we lost a microwave (we think one of the movers nicked it) and our entertainment center got destroyed. When we moved here, the bottom busted out of our bookshelf and yet another entertainment center got destroyed. None of it is ever worth anything when they depreciate it, so we keep buying the crappy pressed-sawdust furniture. A beanbag would be a step up, really.
My movers lost 1 box when I moved cross-country: the one with all of the furniture hardware in it. Since then, I’ve been trying to rebuild.
I found the first couch for my first condo in the back of a furniture showroom. It was deeply discounted because the prior owners had nearly destroyed it after only 15 days of owning it! I was the beneficiary of the store’s generous return policy. They sold it to me for 70% off, and my dad cleaned it up with $5 of cleaning supplies.
Wish I could find more deals like that!
When I was a small boy, about 4, I woke up early, went downstairs, poured syrup, salt and pepper all over my parents’ new coffee table and then took a fork and jabbed it over and over. I then spread cream cheese on the underside. I’m not sure what possessed me.
Our furniture is provided with our apartment.
One night we needed a bigger table because ours was too small. So we took the door off one of our closets and used it as the table. Thankfully it didn’t shatter since it was basically a giant mirror.
my basement flooded a few days after my boyfriend and i bought our house. we had just moved in and put most of our stuff in the basement. our insurance covered the damage and we used a chunk of it to buy a new couch. i looked and looked and finally found the perfect couch—bright celery green with overstuffed cushions. on top of that, i found it at a retailer that was going out of business so i got an excellent deal.
right
as it turns out the fabric pilled horribly. within a few months it looked like it was several years old. less than 2 years later, the relationship is over, the house has been sold, and so has the couch.
now my roommate and i have a really cute thrifted couch that we do our best to take care of, but if it gets stained or something—oh well.
First furniture was given to me by parents & friends…which I kept for something like 9 years…How pathetic right?
Now I have nicer store bought stuff in my home.
All of the furniture in my life have been basically parental hand-me-downs right up until I bought a house. Now it’s my wife’s hand-me-downs and the one piece of furniture I picked out and bought myself. Chairs for the tv room…with cupholders! (gotta have the cupholders)
Nice looking beany.
My main man received, courtesy of their divorce, a seven foot long black leather couch from his aunt and uncle. When I came onto the scene, I had no idea what was being stored up in his parents’ basement, just waiting for our first place together…
It was pretty played out. It was in bad shape. It sucked.
Then we got cats. I won’t say that I gave them a cat treat every time they dug their claws into that piece of furniture, but I didn’t exactly correct them either.
So this abomination just got worse.
Then we had a baby. Still, I lived with it. Ripped, uncomfortable, worn, with questionable discoloration…it stayed. We are under the pressure of two professional degrees worth of student loans, so I thought our money was better spent on something else.
Finally, we had to move. After nights of heart to heart conversations about this couch, he agreed to sell it on Craigslist. For $200. No takers. $100. No takers. $50. No takers. $20. No takers. Freecycle. No takers. On the day before we moved, a guy contacted us off of Freecycle. That afternoon, two students pulled up in an old van with its doors tied together with twine and removed that couch from our lives.
Its been 5 months since that day, and it still makes me smile to walk into my house and not see that piece of furniture.
In college we brought our couch everywhere. My friend had a ginormous van. We’d pack the couch in it and go off and watch some fireworks. It was great fun and perhaps gives me the story I need to win some cool furniture.
Our first “real” piece of furniture was our wedding bed. My husband couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to sleep on the stupid full-size-mattress-on-the-floor he’d been sleeping on for two years. I basically told him that if he didn’t figure out a way for us to sleep in an actual bed, I’d leave him at the altar. Tah-dah! A real bed arrived before the wedding day! (And quite a nice one, too.)
I love stuff that is easy to move and looks good
My first apartment had some nice furniture; partially consisting of upside-down plastic totes from Wal-Mart.
Almost all our furniture came from people who were remodeling. Couches, dining room table, entertainment center, desk. We also got a few standing cupboards from Target (gifts) which I assembled.
Unfortunately, while we have a lovely bedframe, the assembly materials were shipped in cardboard bags taped to the inside of the box. We were lucky enough to find one of the bags but didn’t realize there was another before we’d thrown the box away. So it’s waiting for a run to the furniture store.
Hah! Lazy Man’s story made me laugh. We had a friend who used to do that. We would carry his couch around everywhere. Then one day we carried it to the beach and it rained. Bad
We ended up leaving it overnight. When we returned the next morning it was soggy, sagging in the middle, and full of fleas! (I’m hoping they weren’t there before, but like I said, it was a friend’s couch!).
Needless to say we walked right on by it and never looked back. Wow, I haven’t thought of that in a few years! :D
I actually wrote a post about furnishing my bedroom for under $1k with all-new furniture.
link
My first couch for my college dorm came from the dumpster behind the dorm the day I moved it. It was a black leather couch that had been mended with duck tape more times than I can count. Do my roommate and I lugged it up the stairs and placed it in our room and lovingly named it “Ghetto Couch!” Ghetto Couch became the favorite couch of the dorm floor. It moved with us five times and eventually got stuck out on the back porch and was ruined after being rained on so many times. I will never forget Ghetto Couch.
When I got married, the furniture I had in college quickly became “unacceptable” for our living room. It was discolored and mismatched, but otherwise in good shape. Since it was completely broken-in and immensely comfortable to me, we moved it to our finished basement which has now been dubbed the “man-basement”. It’s got pinball, pool, a big TV for football watching, a beer fridge, and most importantly, exceptionally comfortable, mismatched furniture.
In the category of people will take anything you leave on the curb, we put out our old pressboard entertainment center a while back. It was missing a shelf, the cardboard backing had come off, and it was plain ugly. It also rained the day we put it out, so the laminate was blistering and peeling. Still, less than 24 hours after we put it out, someone came by with a truck and picked it up.
People will always take crap put out on the curb.
My parents were great about “saving” furniture for my siblings and I, so we all lucked out. In college, both my sister and I used an old loveseat that we originally had in our living room. My first tv stand was an end table that was older than I was (and the tv was also a hand me down – it was 12 years old when I got it and now it’s 15ish and in my brother’s house). It was so nice to start out with nice furniture. Sure, it was perhaps out of date and not my style, but it was sturdy, good quality furniture. Now that I’ve bought my own, I sometimes miss that ugly old loveseat. Highly unfashionable, but incredibly comfortable.
I would love to get this for my wife, as she is a fan of lying on the floor in the most uncomfortable of ways. For instance, we have a half-dozen very small ottomans, that rise only about a half-foot off the floor. She is fond of putting several of these next to each other and lying on them when she reads or knits. I’d much rather have her in something a bit more comfortable for her!
I have thought about a bean bag before but I like the style of this chair better.
A sweet lounge chair would sure beat having to sit indian style on my new hardwood floor living room that has no furniture right now.
we picked up a bunch of antique furniture from a rich relative who was getting divorced.
living in a house with 4 twenty somethings and a dog, the furniture is no longer antique.
i bet they would have a stroke if they saw when one of the chairs break and then hit the curb on trash day.
one man’s treasure. . .
I moved into my first apartment when I was in university. The city where I lived did not have a municipal landfill nearby so twice a year the city organized “dump day� where you could put ANYTHING on the curb and they would haul it away. I arrived in town to find heaps of garbage and old furniture that was literally piled up over my head (I’m 6’3�) in front of almost every house. It was quite a welcome to a new city…
The furniture I had was a collection of mismatched family hand-me-down stuff, mostly from my grandparents’ basement, some of which I’m still using. I didn’t have any money to buy new stuff so I made due with what I had (Aside: I was able to finish a 5-year university program with only $6000 in student loans which were paid off within a year). I’m not proud so when I walked down the street and saw a perfectly good set of shelves on the curb waiting to go to the dump, I grabbed them and didn’t look back!
I have been using all second hand furniture for the house so far. All in good shape though. Would be nice to have some ‘new’ this time!
My first furniture was a 4 poster bed given to me on my 16th birthday
I read somewhere that by the age of 30 that you should have a nice set of matching furniture. Hopefully whoever wrote that will never come to my house! Every piece of furniture I have came from a different source. Some were gifts, others came from dead relatives, some from thrift stores, and even an occasional new item. My home may not look “put together”, but it’s unique and super comfy. I like it when a home looks lived-in, not like a picture in a magazine.
Hey Flexo!
This sort of relates to furniture. My wife and I go for the timeless, “antique” look generally, so we have a lot of wood furniture. Unfortunately, we’ve been collecting it over the years so there is really no unified theme or even color.
This became somewhat of a problem when we wanted to put in a hardwood floor—how in the world would anything match? We decided to go with a beautiful solid wood, natural brazilian walnut. The color variation and grain pattern is amazingly varied, from black to orange to brown to yellow and red, from stripes to knots. It is the coolest thing I have ever seen.
We bought it at a decent discount from ifloor.com, way cheaper than we could have gotten at a local flooring retailer. Free shipping, no sales tax :)
Shameless plug, I know, but they have made me a raving fan of their business.
Having said all this, it would be awesome to have a “modern” touch to our living room or office! So pick me!
I am currently downsizing from a 5000 square foot dream home, which I couldn’t afford, to a 1500 square foot loft, and I LOVE IT! I’m at IKEA almost every day, and I’m trying to figure out ways to put wheels/casters on everything so I can move it around all the time.
My two sons share a large open space, which I’ve divided into “pods” for them, using wire shelving, curtains, etc., and they love it too.
The furniture you show would be perfect for us and our new lifestyle!
Most of my furniture came from the side of the road, Craigslist, flea markets and garage sales. I actually saw a nice coffee table on the way to work this morning and am hoping it will still be there on the way home!
Like most kids just starting out, I had nothing of my own but a bed. Besides a hand-me-down sofa, I started out with a lot of crates. Two pushed together for a coffee table, one for a tv stand. Things are somewhat better now, I guess, but we’re still using hand-me-downs and thrift shop furniture. Living in a college town provides great furniture opportunities. College kids aren’t very attached to thier things or their money, so they throw out some good stuff at year’s end. I’ve gotten flower pots, dishes, and lamps, as well as furniture. Yay freebies!
My wife is very happy as we just bought new furniture for our house after living there for seven years. Up until now we’ve had second-hand furniture or rooms with no furniture at all (living room).
This omni chair would be a nice addition for lounging in while watching football on Sundays, although my wife might not like it in her new fancy family room. :)
I can still remember the trama of my parents getting a new living room couch. We’d had an old brown one since I was born. I loved it. The cushions came off and made the perfect fort, plus it was so comfortable. My Dad told me we were giving the couch to someone and getting a new one. I threw myself on the couch sobbing. When they came to get it I wouldn’t move off it. My Mom had to pick me up and carry me to the other room.
Mom says she was so embarrased and baffled and to my attachment to the couch. I cried for days and refused to sit on the new couch for a couple of weeks.
Our first couch was a freebie from a relative who was more relieved to get rid of it than he’d admit. It was iron gray with these ugly dirty swirls. It was a pull-out bed so we slept on it too. The thing had to have weighed 200 lbs and was rusty and smelled moldy. That old giant sat in our living room for two years before we finally moved and left it for the next indigent newlywed couple!
The only furniture that I own that was “new” to me was our queen bed when we got married (no headboard/footboard though) and my desk (on clearance). Where we live, there are alleys and people often put fantastic furniture out, knowing it will get reused. We got a fantastic armoire-type Entertainnment center from the “Alley store” – we get compliments on it and never tell our secret!
My wife’s grandfather died, leaving us one thing in his will: a large, slightly off-pink leather chair. It sits in our living room.
I bought a lay-z-boy recliner off ebay for a a hundred dollars. It was in great shape when I got it except it smelled a little like cats. After a couple sessions of febreezing, it smells as good as new (almost). But now my girlfriend always tries to sit in it too. So we need another chair(esque piece of furniture.)
Thankfully, I’ve never had to take furniture that’s been left on the curb. (not that most of my hand me downs were great, but…) And hopefully no one took the sofa we left on the curb back in college due to, um, urine stains….
looks like lots of people want this bean bag deal. I’ll go ahead and throw my hat in.
When I was in college (8 yrs. ago) I lived with 6 roomates in a big house near campus. The owner of the house sold the property to the business next door and the house was torn down after our lease expired, but before that happened, the owner let us take any piece of furniture we wanted (nothing valuable so no antiques).
I took a small table which I now use as a nightstand and I added a small hidden shelf just underneath the table to hide small valuables in case anyone broke in my house. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you got down on the floor to look. Well, someone did break in my house last week and practically ransacked the place. But the hidden shelf did it’s job. I reached under there and everything I’d hidden was still there.
I have been lusting after these sumo beanbag chairs for at least a year.
An embarrassing/entertaining story about furniture: my grandmother had the most beautiful modern danish furniture that my grandfather had lovingly assembled from kits in the 1950s (the original ikea?). It survived decades of abuse by my father and his four siblings, and a few more decades at the mercy of energetic grandchildren. Until one day, when visiting my grandmother, I (quite gently) sat down on one of the sofas, and the whole thing collapsed, leaving me on the floor blushing and trying to be invisible. I swear, I am not a whale, I am an ordinary human – but after that, I always sat on the floor at grandma’s house.
My aunt had recently renovated her place and bought new furniture to match her new home’s ‘look.’ I ended up taking most of her furniture (still in great condition) and spent less than $100 on furniture to refurnish my entire place.
I’ve been in my house for almost six years now, and I still haven’t gotten around to properly furnishing my family room in the basement. We use to have a bean bag chair, but my son took a bit out of it and all the stuff started falling out. One of those Sumo Lounge Omni Chairs would make a great addition/replacement chair for my basement.
My first apartment was furnished with stuff people left in the dorm on move out day as well as a really comfy chair that was in the study room off the lobby of the dorm.
I’d feel bad about taking that chair if my tuition hadn’t been $16,000 a year :) And it was a really comfy chair – and it was old, so there ya go :)
I just moved into my first post-college (ie not furnished apartment) in August. I furnished the whole place for about $900 using craigslist, clearance sales and hand-me downs and my place looks amazing! The $900 got me a beautiful black leather love seat, dark wood coffee table and end table, dark wood kitchen table with matching chairs, queen size bed with the most comfortable comforter ever and a nice sheet set, a classic looking desk with filing cabinets and hutch, a lazy boy sofa bed that looks great, shower curtain and bath rugs, one nightstand, and lamp. Love my apartment, you’d never know my furniture was used!
I actually stumbled onto their site not too long ago. It looks like a great addition to any living room. Fun and very hip.
I took out a store credit card and used the 12 months now interest financing. I paid it off before the 12 months were up.
When I was in college, I used to sleep on mattresses found on street left out for garbage truck to be picked up.
Awesome! I think I could live in that, if someone would bring me food.
We have a lot of furniture with stories. I won’t put them all here ;)
I moved to AZ from NJ with whatever fit in my car. Needless to say, no furniture. I came out expecting to replace furniture through yard sales, not knowing that there are no yard sales in August in Phoenix – it’s too dang hot. I ended up with a lot of new crappy stuff. Some has been replaced, some not.
My husband was one of seven kids. His parents were quite thrifty. His dad brought home a turquoise vinyl couch from the school where he worked one day in the early 80s – it had been in the teachers’ lounge and they were getting rid of it. At some point, his mom had it recovered. Currently, it’s in our family room with a nice blanket over it, as the recovering is ugly and dirty. Comfy, though.
His grandparents had nice walnut bedroom furniture. When his grandmother started to go crazy, she sawed the mirror off of the dresser. I have the dresser (sans mirror).
Finally, in our family room (with the ancient ugly couch), we had a reclining chair. Being home through cancer treatments, I sat in it frequently. I sat in it one afternoon and it literally just fell apart. On one income (until I can go back to work), we decided not to replace it. The bean bag chair would be a comfy replacement.
Once I moved into my first unfurnished apartment I had a REALLY fun trip to IKEA. The store had just opened in my area so there were great deals and my parents virtually bought it all for me. I got a bed, two dressers, four hopen armoires, and some knick-knack things.
I remember how my parents found out I was moving out for the first time, they came home to their house to see me loading up my bed in a pickup. So I said, “Oh yes by the way, I am moving in with my girlfriend today, I forgot to tell you.”
My parents have something similar to this called a poof chair. Their is always a fight for it on family weekends.
Best piece of free furniture I got was a huge table. I was helping a friend move and their neighbor had this table on their front porch. I went over and asked if they were getting rid of it. They said I could have it for free. I have played many a poker game on that table.
My wife and I got married last December and then moved into a new apartment together. We had the most difficult time finding a couch that we liked that didn’t cost a few thousand dollars so we ended up using a blow-up mattress as our first piece of furniture for about four months while we continued to shop and then wait for the couch to arrive. I don’t think anyone has been quite as excited as we were when the couch was finally delivered.
In my living room I have a secondhand loveseat, but no couch. When more than one person comes over, I have to drag the chairs from the kitchen so everyone will have a place to sit.
I’m too cheap to buy another couch especially since I will probably be moving within the year.
My best furniture story is a desk I got from in front of a Frat house right around graduation. I dragged that incredibly heavy and battered but sturdy 6 ft long desk through three moves before finally giving up and selling it for $50 to a young couple who couldn’t lift it by themselves. I had to knock on the neighbor’s door and get him to help us take it down the stairs. I have no idea how they got it out of the truck when they got home. In a way, I sort of miss it (though it would never have fit up the stairs into my current home office).
In my first apartment, the only furniture I had was a waterbed and a stereo stand (with stereo, of course). I remember any time I would have people over, we would all have to sit on the floor. (In hindsight I can’t imagine what people must have thought who were there for the first time.) But I grew up in a relatively poor, single-parent home, so I guess I didn’t realize how meager my furnishings were at the time. Ironically, my current furniture is in really bad shape, but I feel that I can’t replace it until my…ahem ahem…24 year old son moves out! heheh (Seriously, my younger daughters are fine, but my furniture has seriously suffered under the grimy-ness of the young-adult male!) At any rate, the beanbag would be a lovely addition to my home (but I’ll admit I will have to put it in my room and keep it all for myself—muahahaha!!!) :)
my in-laws were remodeling and we inherited everything they were gonna throw out. it was sweet
My wife and her friend actually won all of the furniture for our first apartment from IKEA. They were having some kind of appreciation day (my wife didn’t even know this, we just needed furniture for our new place) and every now and again they would ring a bell. Then everyone that was online would have a chance to win their entire purchase if their register was randomly chosen. Sure enough, they got chosen and our entire new bedroom set was all free.
One of the reasons people always thought I was so poor growing up is that my bed consisted of just a mattress on the floor. Truth was, however, that I did own the rest of the bed – I just preferred the look of having a mattress right on the floor!
I was back wnen I just moved to this country and the furniture for our first apartment came from the street. I picked up a bed mattress and couch, and we had to store them for a few days in front of my relative’s house until we moved to a newly rented apartment. My relative’s neighbors were wondering if furniture is being thrown out, but were informed of just the opposite, that it was thrown out already, but picked up by us:)
I no longer have that mattress and couch, I bought new ones, but I still have one dresser that came from the street and is my favourite.
Two of the end tables and the coffee table that we have are actually the coffee table and end tables that my mother purchased for her first apartment circa 1970. They’ve since been covered with some more “hip” fabric, but you can still see the bright yellow sharp corners poking through…when I was 1.5 years old my brother pushed me off the coffee table and I bit through my lip…I still have a scar…and the coffee table.
During college I built a coffee table with a design of a Gator head using marbles.
I have never owned new furniture and my wife loves me for it.
We have been together now since 1991 and all those years my lovely wife has appreciated my expertise in acquiring a necessary seat in front of the TV without the usual expense.
Our first set we got a cloth covered simple set from a yard sale for $50.00 a fine piece of furniture back when we smoked, let the dogs in the house, and were young enough to still have drunken stupid parties at the house this furniture was one she didn’t have to worry about losing or devaluing in any way.
Three years later we acquired left over furniture from her parents for free and resold our furniture at a yard sale for $75.00. A $25.00 profit that’s what I’m talking about.
In sales you are fortunate enough to meet a lot of people, and come across a lot of people. 4 years ago was one of those times, late at night in a families home helping them with a purchase they showed me a mountain of New but slightly defective leather furniture in his backyard. The beautifull brown leather was only slightly worn on all the arms, this being the defect, the color was not holding well in the leather so all this was junk.
For $200.00 I picked up a leather couch, recliner and love seat and we’ve been gracing the furniture ever since with our potatoe esque hiney’s. Perfect furniture for a family with kids and dogs. To this day not one stain on this furniture and I bet I could still sell it at my next yard sale for at least what I paid for it.
Meanwhile the saving we’ve taken on the furniture has gone to more important endeavors. Disneyland passes for Kari and Jacob, sailing and other things for me. You can save it or have more fun with it.
I would love to get one of those for my wife who will soon give birth. Looks like it might be comfortable enough to sit or lay on.
If I win, please send the blonde along with the red lounge chair :-)
I bought a couch and a love seat from a retired couple for $50.
It was their living room set and had been for like 15 years. They had put an add in the paper (it was 1996) saying that it was for sale for the weekend and anyone interested had to pick it up before 5 PM on Sunday. I had rented a U-haul to move all my other stuff so I went over with the truck and offered them the $50 on the spot. They had been asking $75, but just wanted it gone, so they accepted and I took the couch and love seat to my new apartment.
The best part is that I still have them. After I bought my house, I put them in the family room. They do need to be replaced since the springs are all worn out, but the fabric is still in great shape. Unfortunately I think my wife is going to make me buy something new before the end of the year.
My first set of end tables and a center table came from a nunnery. Seriously.
They were/are super heavy duty white oak frames with a laminated particleboard table surface. A 2×3’ end table weighed 30 pounds.
I also scored a couple of old brown oak stools with fold-up tops.
I think I paid $200 for all of it, in great condition.
I still have all of this funiture, even 12 years later.
If you live in New Jersey there is furniture outlet about an hour’s drive in Morgantown PA http://www.morgantownfurnitureoutlets.com. I picked up most of my furniture from the outlet when I moved in to a new house.Should check it out.
My first couch was a couch pulled from the commons area of a dormitory. It was well used… but was a pretty decent foldout couch that I slept on for nearly two years before breaking down for a mattress.
Just after my mom remarried, my step-father moved us all from the urban area we’d grown up in out into the sticks onto 250 acres of tumbleweeds and cow-pies. My mom, step-father, three siblings and I all moved into a one-bedroom trailer-house. My two sisters and I shared the 8×8 bedroom, my parents bunked in the living room on a pull-out bed, and my brother slept in the bathtub. Living so far from civilization, we naturally used well-water—in an area with a high sulfur content. After just one week, the bathtub developed a permanent yellow streak from the sigot to the drain and the house was permeated with that pungent sulfur smell. As for furniture, all we had room for other than beds and a single dresser was a breakfast table and chairs.
The majority of my furniture is actually scavenged from the street. It’s amazing what people will put out on the streets here in NY.
Furnishing my first place involved taking whatever I could beg my parents into getting rid of, and whatever inexpensive stuff I could buy and assemble myself. It’s been a few years since my end tables/coffee table/dining room table/bookshelves came out of boxes, but my Dad still jokes that I wouldn’t know what to do with furniture I didn’t have to assemble myself.
I got most of my furnitures for free. A friend of mine was moving and left us with a great dining table and comfortable office chairs. Some other friends gave those ikea tables when they upgrade to sturdier tables. And of course, when my office decided to throw away bookshelves to make space for cubes, I snatched 5 of them in a heartbeat.
These free furnitures are still in excellent condition. And on top of that, they are either black or white, so it’s easy for me to coordinate. Lucky me!
Our house is still pretty much furnished with hand-me-downs, mostly from my family. Senior year of college, my husband received his first job offer which included a relocation package. He had been renting an apartment with a friend. The moves came out to move his stuff and were flabbergasted when they arrived and found that sheer lack of furniture. He had on futon which was disassembled, a foldable table and a foldable bookcase. All of his other possessions pretty much fit into two boxes. I think it was the smallest moving job the company had ever done!
Bag looks really comfortable and would go great with my red curtains.
Looking around our home, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a total cheapskate. Not one piece of our furniture was purchased new. Hand-me-downs, craigslist and freecycle define our decor. Fortunately I have a wonderful wife who somehow pulls all of these varying styles together. It would be fun to challenge her with an oversized beanbag chair!
Thanks for all the great posts…it’s a great way to pass the time and learn how to be more cheap…I mean, live more cheaply. Frugally. Whatever.
-Brian
When my wife and I got married and moved into a new place, we had very little furniture. All of my previous apartments had been furnished. We ate thanksgiving dinner sitting on the floor around a coffee table. We chose to save up our money and buy when we had funds to pay for stuff instead of going into debt. We also took advantage of second-hand stores like Goodwill to keep costs down.
This sumo lounge is exactly what we’ve been looking for for kids and adults in the theatre room. We like this much better than a bean-bag chair! This has so much more class and really many other uses. Thanks for the heads up on this great product!
Nice chair. I remember the old BeanBag chair from my college days. My friend sat on it really hard and it shot the stuffing everywhere – what a mess. I do think the Omni looks more comfortable and would be interested in trying one. Nice.
CJ
I used to have a chair that we called “angryman” – This chair would literally go out of it’s way to cause stubbed toes, banged knees and damange to anyone that wasn’t already sitting in it.
Angryman was put in storage. Ironically, about 3 months ago, the storage unit angryman was staying at was burned to the ground. 25 units gone with all of their respective contents. There was,however, 1 survivor: You guessed it – Angry man. The wooden recliner had barely a whiff of char on it. It sat there suspiciously as if IT had caused the fire.
We’ll never know.
I recently bought a condo and I’m now filling it with furniture, which has been a fun, yet tiring shopping experience. The Sumo Lounge Omni Chair would be a great addition and conversation piece to add to my living space.
While living in a mostly-student apartment complex, we had a couple of quiet international students who lived 2 doors down. When they graduated to move back home, they dumped most of their furniture next to the dumpster. I don’t think they even made it back in their door before people swooped down to grab things. I was just getting home from work, and found a neatly disassembled Ethan Allen table sitting back behind everything else. All it took was a thorough cleaning, and the table is in near-perfect condition.
This is a long story about my furnishing my first apartment. When I got my first real job out of college I moved into my first non-furnished apartment. I had an air mattress and a few odds and ends that my parents gave me from the attic but no real furniture. After graduation in May I placed all of my belongings in storage for a couple months while I traveled around, and then rented a large U-haul to complete my move in time for my mid-July start. I stopped to sleep halfway through my 15 hour drive from school to the new town and noticed across the street there was a furniture store going out of business having a liquidation sale. I decided to investigate the next day before setting out. One of the perks of my new job was that I got a $5k signing bonus. I also had a few hundred dollars in graduation money from my various relatives. After paying for deposits and fees for my storage location, apartment, truck rental, and an engagement ring for my soon-to-be fiancee I had a couple thousand left. Mind you, this money was indicated to me in a letter offering me employment (which I had formally accepted). I walked into the furniture store and with the help of my girlfriend picked out a whole house full of furniture for $2,500. I got a queen bed w/ mattress, dinning room table w/ 4 chairs, sofa, coffee table, 2 end tables, a futon, and a buffet table. I had made a killing, I even didn’t have to pay for delivery because I already had a half-full U-haul sitting outside. In all I got furniture with a retail price of over $7k for $2.5k. That day I finished my drive to my new apartment and moved in. Three days later I started my new job and the first thing that happened was I got called into the facility director’s office where he told me that regrettably they had run out of fund to pay for signing bonuses. My jaw must have hit the floor. At that point I had spent all of my money plus $5k (on credit) except about $20 in my wallet. Thankfully, to compensate me I was given a raise to my base salary that would, over time, pay me back the whole signing bonus (an in the long term end up with more money), but I carried that credit card balance for over a year before I could pay it all off (at over 15% interest). That sure taught me to never count my chickens before they hatch.
When I was young, money was tight, so my parents were not above a bit of dumpster diving. They once found a “perfectly nice” armchair that someone was pitching (alas, the poor little green naugas that gave their hides for it . . .). It wasn’t until they got it home that they realized that some precocious child had scrawled “Firetruck” (just misspelled it, since they forgot the “iretr”) across the back of it in huge letters . . . presumably the reason it was being disposed of in the first place. It still found a happy place in our home, it just always stayed against the wall.
The entire time I grew up I had hand-me-down furniture. My bed was my grandmother’s old one, the dresser from my aunt and so on. So when my hubby and I bought a house we went crazy and got all new furniture. A little hard on the check book, but it felt great.
My wife and I are moving on Friday and we have been in the process of getting rid of much of our old dumpy furniture on craigslist. Including an old recliner that I absolutely loved. So I need a replacement and the Omni sounds perfect!
I’m a college student. Right now my living room contains an armchair from circa 1970 that I inherited, two folding lawn chairs, and a rickety desk chair my mother’s office was going to throw out. I spend more time on pillows on the floor than on my furniture.
My first apartment out of college was furnished incredibly cheaply: I used a twin futon frame from a friend, bricks & boards bookcases, and a super-ugly (but cheap!) dresser from Goodwill. It was the first time since I was 4 that I had my own room, and it was heaven to me.
Since my furnishings were all scrounged, when I moved cross-country (via Amtrak!) three years later I was able to leave it all behind without a twinge of regret!
Now, nearly 15 years later, I do have furniture I’ve paid a bit of money for, but nothing that I can’t leave behind if my restless urge hits again.
What a great item! I love the work you have been doing on the site and these giveaways are a great way to drive comments. Good thinking!
I want this! I NEED this! Ever since my millionaire girlfriend kicked me out 2 months ago, I have been painfully reminded that I left without furniture. Now, in the shabby apartment I have rented (it’s so bad that they send free trial packs of methadone to everyone when they sign a lease), I am set to worry about germs, bed bugs, and of course, mattress springs that attack me like I insulted someone in their family. BUT YOU CAN HELP! Just send me that thing, now. In Black. Thanks!!!
this looks great. it will look even better in my sad empty living room.
I’ve been able to furnish my apartment almost completely with new furniture that was discounted due to damage (usually scratches that could be easily touched up).
This will be a great replacement for my 25 year old vinyl couch in the basement.
The bane of my existence are our 2 filing cabinets. They represent clutter to me since my wife’s papers from the last 10+ years of school and work are crammed inside. Next up is a free desk we got, but never use, except for yet more papers.
I look at that chair, and I can see my son and I sitting on it reading a book. It looks so comfy!
Our first apartment was furnished (thankfully) so we just purchased an end table and a desk from Walmart.
I just moved to DC for a year, leaving all my furniture back home in St. Louis. Mercifully, I only have to furnish my bedroom. I bought the mattresses separately (the box off craiglist, the top mattress I had to rent a minivan and drive an hour to pick up in order to nix the delivery fees—was about $10 cheaper to do it this way and NOT worth it, I know now). I found a free desk on Craigslist, but the best part of my bedroom furniture is this: my aunt inherited a bunch of random asian-inspired furniture (read: black furniture covered with big, painted flowers and with scenes of Asian women near ponds, etc. glued to the sides) which she gave me for free. So my room’s overall ‘decor’ theme is: mismat