Welcome to Sofa Sagas—stories about the circuitous search for a very important and occasionally fraught piece of furniture.

In 2018, I moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn, the biggest I’d ever lived in on my own. To mark the occasion, I took the train to the ferry to the Red Hook Ikea, selecting for my new living room a nubby, maroon couch with steel legs and what felt, at the time, like exceptionally plush cushions. It had wide arms and space for two people to really get comfortable, and a year later, my now-husband moved in, joining me for post-dinner drinks and weekend Real Housewives of New Jersey binges.

A few months later, as the couch passed its first birthday, the pandemic hit, and our humble Ikea sofa was suddenly being asked to fill a lot of roles: it was my home office, it was, along with the coffee table, our dining set, it was the entertainment center where we spent hours upon hours watching Godzilla movies and scrolling on our phones. I also started storing mail, hair ties, lip balms, and eye masks in between my side’s cushion and armrest, a really charming habit my husband loved. This meant that my side was always a little off, the bottom cushion pushed out a few inches by a bent-up copy of my college alumni magazine.

The couch literally crumpled under the weight of these burdens, and once a week we’d talk about how we couldn’t wait to get rid of it. Except. Except! In addition to the pandemic-related spike in furniture costs and in furniture delivery wait times, we lived in a third-floor walk-up with steep, narrow stairs, and we knew that our old couch wasn’t leaving that apartment until we did.

And who, we thought silently and aloud, knew when that would be.

We bided our time, daydreaming about what our next home would have: a washer and dryer! Windows that opened properly! A bathroom big enough to turn around in! What our next couch would look like—not visibly sagging! A vibrant color that wouldn’t fade! Room for our large collection of novelty throw pillows! And then, in the summer of 2024, the opportunity to move out of the city entirely presented itself. In the middle of August we found ourselves signing a lease that would begin October 1. We had, we assumed, plenty of time to purge and pack and shop for a new couch, and then my husband fell and sprained his rotator cuff, a three-day trip to my grandparents’ house in Dallas turned into six days thanks to airline shenanigans, and we both, for the first time, got Covid.

My husband turned to me and said the words I’d been too afraid to speak myself. “We could just…order something from Wayfair?”

As the date of our move rapidly approached—a month and a half is really not a lot of time, is it?—I began to panic. I stayed up late into the night looking at the West Elm website, filtering by the options that were in stock and wondering if I could come up with $5,000 for a brown linen couch I didn’t even like that much. Our new apartment’s neighbor was a cool-looking custom furniture store, and for a few days we entertained the fantasy of buying something hyperlocal, until we realized that “price upon request” was probably out of our budget, which we’d hoped to keep capped at $2,000. We both had a dream couch in mind: his, a perfectly worn-in leather Chesterfield; mine, something out of a Mario Buatta space, overstuffed and bold, in a chintzy floral or a silky stripe. Still, it was becoming clear that the couch of our dreams was going to be the couch we could get at a good price and in a timely fashion—and could we even manage that?

Other ideas we bandied about with increasing levels of anxiety: renting a car and driving to every thrift store in our new town’s radius, hoping to find something with vintage charm and no weird smell; showing up at a Raymour & Flanagan and begging them to sell us a floor model; sitting on the floor for three months. That last one wasn’t a real option, for both mental and musculoskeletal reasons, and neither was bringing our old couch. It was a symbol of the life we were leaving behind, and also I wasn’t sure if it would even survive the trip.

Finally, a week before 1-800-JUNK was scheduled to come to haul our old couch away, my husband turned to me and said the words I’d been too afraid to speak myself.

“We could just…order something from Wayfair?”

We’d put off going there (to wayfair.com, I mean) for a number of reasons. Our old couch had ceased to be comfortable, and we wanted to actually sit on whatever we were going to buy next. I have a history of back issues, and a too-soft or too-hard surface could result in days of aches and pains, and neither of us wanted to commit to something only to find an armrest uncomfortably digging into their side while trying to watch a golf tournament (golf tournaments are long!). The algorithm pushed things we knew we’d never want: some were too expensive, some were suspiciously inexpensive, and some felt like they only existed in the context of podcast ads. It was impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff—I mean, I love to scroll, but 5,000 pages of couches is too many couches, even for me! I knew he had a point, though. With other retailers suggesting a six-week delivery window as optimistic, Wayfair could have a couch to us within 48 hours, meaning we could pick one, have it come to our new place before the movers got off the New Jersey Turnpike, and spend our first night in our new home eating pizza somewhere other than the floor. (Plus, their spokeswoman is Kelly Clarkson, and I trust her!)

I set up my search parameters, looking for something that was:

Over $1,000 but less than $2,000
Dark green (the we could both agree on)
A fabric that could easily be cleaned
Neither overtly traditional or fake midcentury modern

We wound up picking the first one on the list, the Joss & Main Fleetwood sofa in “Beverly Forest Green Velvet,” on sale for $1,799 with free white-glove delivery, which meant that, exactly one hour before the moving truck pulled up, two very nice men carried the sofa into our new living room, made sure the legs were on tight, and left us to sit down, marveling at our good fortune.

My review, after almost six months, is this: the sofa is fine. It’s good! The color is rich but not overpowering, and it’s long enough for one person to lay down without kicking the person at the other end. I wish the back cushions were a little more supportive, but that’s easily remedied with pillows. Sometimes I wish the seat cushions had a little less give, but since I spend less time on the couch these days, I don’t mind so much.

I write about interiors for a living, and it’s a vocation born out of true passion: I love reading, writing, and looking at furniture and decor, and dreaming about the pieces I’d love to own someday. I also now know, though, that sometimes you have to prioritize function over form.

This couch functions! It might not be an “ultimate couch moment,” but it is, at the moment, the couch we needed, and for that I’m very thankful.

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Illustration by Noemi Fabra

Related Reading:

Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad?

My Exasperating Odyssey to Find the Perfect (Not Gray) Couch(es)