Why why why Delilah?

That's the name of a Tom Jones song and it has nothing to do with this post. Well, I suppose I'm about to shake my fist at the sky and shout "Why?!" The similarities stop there though.

I am spending the better part of this weekend drawing my heart out and coming up with great rooms for clients. As I'm wont, I have the TV on low in the background to provide white noise. I'm working on another floor plan and the project in question is the back end of a house. We're removing a bunch of the interior walls and creating an open floor plan to replace the rabbit warren of hallways and small rooms that are in the space now. When this is all said and done, the family room, the kitchen and the dining room will all be in one big space. Even though I don't sell furniture or carpets, I usually end up specifying the furnishings that go into the rooms I draw.

So as I was sitting here, drawing away contentedly, I heard a commercial for Rooms to Go that jarred my out of my reverie. Rooms to Go is a chain of cheap furniture stores in the South that specializes in selling entire rooms of matching furniture at once. It's all bad --poorly designed and poorly constructed imported garbage that will end up being thrown away in five years. They are running a special this weekend where they're giving away a 40" flat screen TV with the purchase of one of their $1900 living rooms.

Because I'm drawing a living room, I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to living room assaults right now and the $1900 living room they're pimping is just that, an assault. I mean, look at this thing:

My eyes burn when I have to look at stuff like that. Sheez-oh-man, I get it that there's plenty of room in this world for everybody's tastes, but this stuff is beyond the pale.

Here is is again from another perspective:

And here it is with no people in it so you can better imagine yourself reclining in this luxury.

Imagine, drink holders and snack trays built right into your sofa! No wonder Americans are so bloody fat. They ought to call this the Lethargy Sofa. It gets worse though.

To the left of the guy in the second photo is a white table lamp.

This is it. Again, ouch. They are throwing this in with the $1900 living room suite as a bonus.

I don't understand what would prompt someone to waste money on crap like this. In addition to being poorly made, it looks terrible. That Lethargy Sofa up there retails for $1199.99 when it's purchased on its own.

For 99 cents less, you can have the 84-inch Eugene sofa from Room and Board. The Eugene is made in the US, it's tasteful, it's well made and will last forever. Finding reasonably-priced, well-made furniture is not difficult but it does require a little legwork. You don't have to chose between Rooms to Go crap and a $10,000 heirloom-quality sofa. Really. There's a nearly unlimited number of options between those extremes. When it comes to furniture, how it's made is more important than who made it. Do a little research, find out what makes a good sofa a good sofa. I wrote a piece on sofa construction back when I was just starting out as a blogger. Check out Sofas, Sofas Everywhere but not a Place to Sit from February, 2008. And now that that's out of my system I can get back to work.