Amidst all the noises of garbage landing in the pile and large machines working away I heard the sound of my long time friend being crushed in to a thousand pieces. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. The couch that has been my comfort every evening for 10 years finally had it’s last behind on it yesterday. At first I thought that old thing would ride it’s way in to the garbage truck, parked under the garbage transfer station, in one piece. She held on for a long time slowly sliding in front of the massive Caterpillar machine that flattens the garbage down before pushing it in to the truck. Just as the couch was about to go over the edge in to the truck, the machine lifted up it’s front blade and then slammed the blade down crushing the couch. Okay, so I knew that was going to happen when I threw it over the chains in to the pit but I was really hoping to see it get run over by the large tracks instead of being crushed by the blade.
That’s my long winded way of saying, on top of all the other money we spent this weekend, we also bought a new couch. It has really been a long time coming. Frankly, it was embarrassing to invite people in to our house because our couch was falling apart. We had already flipped the cushions over a number of times and both sides of each cushion had worn through the fabric down to the stuffing. The armrests were worn and stuffing was coming out of those too. I feel good that we got the absolute maximum time out of that couch, but I’ll still miss it. I have many pictures of my wife and I, as well as other family members, holding my daughter while sitting there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all sentimental about the couch, it’s just that it was the most comfortable couch I’ve ever owned.
If you been reading this blog for any amount of time you’ll know that I’m not the type of person to just walk out and buy a couch (and love seat) without doing a bit of homework. My wife, daughter and I went to a number of furniture stores before realizing that the leather couch and love seat at Costco were a really good deal. We’ve been wanting leather furniture because it’s helpful for all of my allergies and they are pretty comfortable. We also like the reclining capability of both.
I did a little number crunching on the old couch and figured out that the couch cost me $5.83 per month during the 10 years we had it. I’d say that’s a reasonable cost for a comfortable couch. That’s less than 20 cents per day. I usually take a minute to calculate the average cost of any major purchases that I part with just to see what kind of value the item delivered to me over it’s life. By doing this I can tell if my purchase was just cheap, or was actually a good value over it’s lifetime. Mostly this is just for my entertainment but it can help me see whether my trend is to spend too little on things that won’t last. I’ve been bitten a few times when I purchased higher priced items that didn’t last very long and I’ve really cleaned up on items that were low cost but ended up lasting me a long time. Our current iron is a great example of this:
When my wife and I were married, we bought a new iron that we thought could last us a lifetime. The iron cost us $90 and only lasted about one year. That’s an average cost of $7.50 a month. Yikes. That iron cost me more than my couch on a monthly basis. We bought our current iron when that failed and have had it for 9 years. After getting such a dismal life span out of the expensive iron, we decided to buy a much less expensive model. We purchased a Sunbeam iron for about $30. After 9 years the iron is still going strong, which comes out to less than 28 cents per month. The less expensive Sunbeam turned out to be a much better value for us in the long term. Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew the exact value something would deliver when you purchased it?
Anyway, the old couch is now sitting in a massive stench of garbage at the local landfill. I wish there was someplace that you could take them to recycle them. I considered giving it away on Craigslist but it was in such bad shape that I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting it and was kind of afraid of who might show up to take it. In the end we decided it was probably best to just take it to the garbage dump.
Sounds like you have a lot a purchases recently, couch, stove, large heating bill… I hope you got a large bonus.