Remember just a few posts back when I was saying how important it was to be flexible because unexpected things always happen? Well, most of the time I love being right… but I could have used a smaller ‘unexpected’ curve ball than the one Belinda and I got last week.

We ordered her sofa and bought the credenza before she had moved in, before I’d been into her building, much less her new apartment, and before we had taken an inch worth of actual measurements. The first plan below is the one that the building had given her and the second is the space she actually moved into. Notice the difference (besides that they are mirror versions of each other)?

The difference between the entries might not seem big, but it’s the difference between being able to get her new sofa through the door… or not.

BIG. BUMMER.

If the entryway had actually been laid out as reflected in the first plan, life would have been easy. Just bring that puppy straight through the front door and you’re set. But her apartment door actually opens right into a closet and a very sharp, 90 degree turn. The sofa we ordered was eight feet long and between the tight turn and eight foot ceiling there was just no way to make it work. I am pretty optimistic, and pretty determined, so it was only after attempting to push the creative limits of the delivery men, innocently asking if we could cut a hole in the wall and then patch it up, and then being teased by the furniture company that I might be able to hire people to disassemble the sofa to get it into her place and put it all back together (I had no idea people could do this until now – completely amazing!) and then learning that it still wouldn’t work because the back of the sofa is still one, long ass eight foot piece of impossible, that I gave in. So back to the furniture store it went… and so much for early ordering to make for a shorter wait on having somewhere to sit. Sigh… I so hate admitting defeat.

The new sofa is ordered and (unfortunately) the wait continues for a little longer… but we are having fun making the final selections for everything else going in her place and I can’t wait to share them with you soon!