Wait! Where are you going? Aren't you happy for me? It's very exciting. It is!

If you don't think so then you've never bought a sofabed, not a new one made to your specifications with fabric you chose, and the extra good mattress for the sleeper part of it, and everything as firm or as soft as you want it. I'm just thrilled. I can't stop thinking about it. A brand new sofa seems like such an extravagance, but suddenly I can afford it and I am tired of hand me downs. I got my fiscal year end bonus on Friday. Hellooooo, Krause's.

We looked around at three stores, but the minute I saw the clean, tailored lines of the "Stanford" sofa I knew I was going to buy it. It took about 10 minutes to decide on it, mainly due to the hilarity of realizing the only difference between the "Stanford" and the "Berkeley" was the "Berkeley" had a skirt. In fact, the hardest part was choosing the fabric. Boy, there isn't much soft yet durable material for sofas. You get soft, or you get durable. For the most part it's stiff, hard-wearing brocades, mattress style broadcloth, easily shredded velvet (okay, we have cats, we assume people without pets don't shred their velvet sofas much), bumpy corderoy which leaves patterns on bare skin, leather (too many little claws in our life), or delicately patterned silks which seemed far too formal for our lifestyle. We rejected all florals, and the plaids were mostly too bold. There were surprisingly few color intensity choices, too. Everything was either too dark for a queen sized sofa which is going to dominate our little living room, or too neutral to be interesting.

Then I saw the bronze chenilles. Their golden caramel colors were so pretty in the sunlight, and so rich in the shadowy center of the store, that I knew immediately we would love that color day or night. So we chose a fabric, ordered everything, I wrote a check, and in two to four weeks they'll deliver our new sofa. It's going to be a wonderful addition: a place to read or study, a guest bed that I'm not ashamed of, a comfortable place for three people at a time to sit. It's going to be a pleasure to sit in the living room this winter.

Domestic pleasures make me very happy.

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