It takes a special kind of stubbornness to realize you are sitting on a piece of retail history. We purchased our current specimen back in May 2006 at a Sears Canada Outlet Store in Coquitlam. To put its longevity into perspective, the hide-a-bed couch actually outlasted the entire corporate empire that sold it to us; Sears folded up its Canadian tents and vanished entirely in 2017. Twenty years is an incredibly respectable run for such an oft-used piece of furniture, but it was undeniably showing its age. For years, Jay and I have been casually discussing the replacement with a standard couch. This eJournal is littered with periodic, failed couch-hunting missions peppered across 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Today, the streak of indecision finally ended, when we sort-of-accidently bought one!
The entire acquisition happened by chance during a quick logistics run over to Surrey. We drove across the river to pick up a little Sony Voice Recorder I had ordered online from Best Buy yesterday. Because it was a Sunday, the electronics retail gates didn’t swing open until 11:00 am, which left us with about ten minutes of dead time to kill. Naturally, we wandered deeper into the mall to avoid standing awkwardly by the shuttered entrance and happened upon a showroom for The Brick, a local furniture retailer.
We spotted a lot of living room furniture through the windows and ambled inside. Jay and I walked around the acre of it and started comparing the loveseat-sized sofas. A gray leather one looked promising. In the past, I had sketched out a diagram with the exact dimensions of our present sofa on a napkin. Some of those specific details had stuck in my head, and we wanted to replicate the size exactly. Finding one that matched our requirements had proven difficult until today's fit the bill. We didn’t take the reduced-price floor demo model, but instead ordered a brand-new one in the same gray color for delivery.
