This week we took our first couch out to the curb. We couldn’t even give it away. It was falling apart. Bad.
As I stood at our doorway, looking to see if anyone would stop and take our couch before the garbage truck came, I thought about all that our little white couch had seen us through.
The Infamy of the Purchase
Tires squealed as my husband pulled out of the gas station off of the feeder road to I-10, just down the street from IKEA. We rented a van to transport our new couch and other furniture from IKEA, but we didn’t want to pay for more than one hour. So we ran. We ran carrying each box from the parking lot and through the apartment complex to our apartment and then back for more. We rushed to return the same amount of gas in the tank as was there when we rented it. And we made it in one hour with only seconds to spare. The man at the rental desk was impressed.
Our First Apartment
That couch was the only seating in our tiny one-bedroom apartment off of Westheimer Avenue in Houston. We sat there to watch TV, read books, and because our apartment was too small to have any dining room table, we ate most of our meals sitting on that couch, too.
Moving Up
When we moved out of our apartment, we were young and stupid. My husband had actually gone to help another friend move earlier that morning. I had stayed up late the night before packing and cleaning. As we carried our couch from our apartment to our moving truck, with no warning at all, my arms gave out. The couch hit the pavement with a thud. My husband turned around in wonder. I stood—powerless—and laughed. What else could I do? My arms had just dropped! My husband, determined to get the job done, threw the cushions into a pile on the sidewalk and hoisted the whole couch onto his shoulder and carried it to the moving truck himself! I stood in awe, then grabbed cushions and followed after him. I shouted after him, “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?!”
Our first house
We moved our new couch into our first house the next day. We had no other furniture and tile floors downstairs, so every sound echoed. The couch scooted a few inches on the tile every time we sat down. We took months to decide on just the right rug for our family room. Our little white couch was plenty big for just the two of us.
Friends’ visits
We welcomed many people into our home through the years. More often than not, most of those people sat on our little white couch. It was comfortable and once we got a rug underneath it, it was less likely to shift when we sat down. We heard good news, bad news, funny stories, and confessions from friends, family members, and neighbors while sitting on our little white couch. We celebrated baby showers, birthdays, baptisms, holidays, and reunions with family and friends gathered on or around our little white couch.
Babysitters and well-intentioned family members often turned our cushions over to hid spills and stains. People always commented on our little white couch, mostly in surprise that it was still white. I was always grateful for the removable slipcovers and bleach. They restored our couch to white almost completely with each wash.
Our first dog
Our first puppy joined our family and hid under that couch a few times before she outgrew it. Once I was gone at work and my husband had to go pick me up (we only had one car back then) and he tried to get our sweet little puppy out from under the couch. She got scared and attacked his forearm with a vengeance. When they came to pick me up, poor Nick had band-aids all over his arm.
Our second dog
Our second dog came to our family about a year later. She was a rescue dog and she suffered from terrible anxiety. Her “happy tail” splattered blood over the back of our little white couch for months before we could get her issues a little more under control. She still ate the arm of our little white couch not once, but twice. I learned a lot about how to reupholster furniture (Thanks, YouTube) and still have spray-on adhesive and a little bit of batting and foam in my fabric stash because of her. She was a black Lab and she could not walk past the couch without rubbing across the back of it like a giant cat. Every time. She was the reason we went back to IKEA to buy additional slip covers for our couch. We also attempted dying our white slipcover brown with fabric dye. It worked for a few months before it started to fade…
Hurricane Ike
When the power went out during Hurricane Ike, we didn’t last long upstairs before we came downstairs with flashlights and a battery-powered radio. We sat on our little white couch and listened to the voices of the KHOU reporters telling us of the damage and the plights of our fellow Houstonians as we sat in darkness, waiting.
That time my mother-in-law came to stay with us for a year and a half
I was pregnant with our twins at the time, so I took up residence on the recliner (our BFFs had given it to us) most of the time I was home. My mother-in-law probably preferred the recliner, too, but she selflessly gave it up for me every evening when I came home from work. There were many nights when I fell asleep in the recliner and she fell asleep on the little white couch. Nick would come home from a late night football game and try to wake us both up and convince us to go to our own beds.
Our first children
Our first babies came home on monitors. They were not easy to transport. We got stir-crazy after being in our bedroom for weeks and we started trying to bring them downstairs. We sat on our little white couch with our new little angels, feeling incredibly blessed. For the sake of taking paparazzi-style photos of our new offspring, we propped them up side-by-side on that couch many times. They, in turn, blessed our couch with reflux-induced spit up.
All five children
We welcomed all five of our children into our home and we all sat on that little white couch, though not comfortably all at the same time. We once carried our couch out into our backyard to take a family photo. When our fifth child arrived, we decided it was time to spring for a new couch that could seat all seven of us at the same time. Our recliner had already been destroyed beyond repair by our second dog and we needed more seating in our family room.
A New Couch
After we bought a new, bigger couch, we moved our little white couch to the playroom. There it stayed for the next two years, providing seating occasionally, but more often than not, the cushions were used as giant blocks and my kids built forts and “houses” to play in. But the playroom was too much for our aging couch. My boys were too young and too inherently destructive. The arm of our little white couch, the same arm that had been reupholstered all those years before, was now coming apart at the frame. The unforgiving particleboard of our IKEA couch was not willing to return to its original shape or form. We pushed that arm against a wall when guests came to stay with us this summer, a final chance for our little white couch to comfort a friend’s child who slept on it for a few nights while they were in town.
A Playroom Transformation
But then we decided to transform the playroom into another bedroom and provide more space for our boys to sleep. There would be no place to keep the old white couch anymore. I came home one day to find our couch sitting in our foyer. I imagined my husband carrying it down the stairs on his shoulder, like he had carried it through our apartment complex a decade before. But I am sure he just slid it easily down the stairs instead.
I am grateful for the memories—and food crumbs, tears, and stains—that are forever embedded in that little old white couch. And though it is often hard to let things go, I am grateful for the knowledge that the memories continue to live on even when the couch is no longer with us.
Do you have an equivalent to our little white couch? If so, what is it? Is it still around?
I love this post. This little white couch provided comfort to us while we lived with you in the summer and when we came to stay with you with our days old little baby during hurricane Ike. I remember your first apartment. Did we sleep on the couch that Thanksgiving? Our babies have been on there too. I loved how you made it so special and a part of your life. Well written and rest in peace little white couch.
Thanks, Sarah! Yes! Y’all have shared lots of fun memories with us on our little white couch! I can’t remember if you slept on the couch or if we had an air mattress in our tiny apartment. I was searching for pictures from back then but I don’t have any digital ones, so I’m going to have to dig through old photos to see. Either way, I am so very grateful to have amazing friends like you to share memories with.