It Aint Easy Being Green

You’d be stretching to call me houseproud. I do the absolute bare minimum to make my home livable, I don’t ever see myself being featured in an issue of Better Homes.

But I have a want.

More accurately, a need.

I need a lime green sofa. I can’t look at my lounge room without mentally ridding myself of the grey ’80s sofa that is currently sitting in the corner and replacing it with a bright acid green sofa. Not mint, not a hint of green, something that makes any visitor ponder whether I’ve skinned Kermit The Frog to make a comfortable seating area for my home.

Our current sofa was the one Dan had when I moved in with him five years ago. It has a grey fan pattern with pink highlights, it’s modular and every time you sit on it each section shifts, meaning that you need to move it back into place multiple times each day, it has a lingering smell that I can only describe as two year old fishfingers. I hate this sofa so much that I actually avoid photographing the kids on that side of the room because I don’t want to look at the pictures in the future and see it.

But that isn’t the worse of it…

Last week my Mother In Law moved into a new house, of course this brought out all the old photo albums as the boxes were being unpacked. I was looking at pictures of my Sister In Law at her Debutante Ball, at sixteen years old, and there, in the background, was they grey five seater monstrosity that currently lives in our lounge.

I don’t have a problem with using my mother in law’s old sofa. What does bother me is that my SIL is now 33, making the sofa roughly a million years old. It isn’t retro and funky, it’s the furniture equivalent of hammer pants, it wasn’t great then and it’s so much worse now, it’s slap bracelets and gigantic perms, it doesn’t belong in this time and it doesn’t belong in my damn lounge room.

I’m not insane, I have no desire to go out and spend thousands of dollars on a sofa when we have t0ddlers and babies in the house. My grand plan is to pick up a cheapy sofa from Fantastic Furniture, in lime green, abuse the hell out of it for a few years and then replace it when my life is ruled slightly less by sticky hands and stray crayons. By the time we need a new sofa I’ll be over the green and far more open to the idea of a far more sensible and neutral colour.

But my husband is a cruel man, who apparently will not “give into fads“. According to him the grey hulk sofa is wonderful, the seats perfectly mold to his body and it’s long enough that his 6ft4 frame can sleep on it, but none of that is his main reasoning for keeping it for the last 25 years. The number one reason that I, according to Dan, need to show respect to the 20 year old sofa that has seen more arses than George Michael, is because “at least when the kids vomit on it the pattern covers it up!”.

I’m not kidding, that is his number one selling point.

O_o

I just don’t know where to start on that one.