Chair Search, Part 1: Craigslistin’

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Craigslist is like the wild west. Every time I venture into that virtual marketplace of random used goods, I feel like everyone there is whooping it up, riding wild-eyed galloping horses, kicking up dust with six-shooters drawn all around me. To coin a phrase, ” You just never know what you’re gonna get.” This is not to say that the occasional frustration or colorful experience is not all part and parcel of the deal; it’s actually part of the thrill of the hunt. Case in point, I’ll share with you Monday’s Craigslist adventure…

Being on a budget, I’ve been scouring CL for the last couple of months in search of a small club chair to put into Caden’s new big boy room. I wanted something that was relatively new, well-manufactured, and obviously in very good shape if it was going to go in my little boy’s room for story time and night time snuggling. I also wanted a light oatmeal or cream color and I wanted clean lines (not one of these wingbacked numbers from the 80’s which for some reason are plen-tee-ful on CL.)

I’d been browsing periodically when suddenly this club chair - which appeared to meet my requirements - pops up in my search:

It looked like it might work. It was listed for $95 dollars, too, which was doable, so I called the owner and set up a time to meet. We loaded up the baby, took the back seat out of the van, and Chris and I set off hopefully to pick up the new chair.

When we arrived, I had some misgivings. The multicolored (mid-project?) siding on the house was partially falling down and the garage doors were both askew at weird angles to reveal a space chock full of furniture and appliances and all manner of other busy business. As I got out and made my way up the driveway, I was startled by a large 5” PVC pipe coming out of the garage to the driveway which loudly dispensed what looked like greywater of some kind.

“Nevermind,” I thought, wanting to give the benefit of the doubt. “Don’t judge a book by its cover…” and I kept going up to a small, colorful, and crowded second story porch to the front door where I met met an attractive blonde woman who never introduced herself but who shook my outstretched hand nonetheless. She ushered me through the open front door to see the chair which had been placed in the front foyer for inspection. When I walked in, it was obvious that the picture I had seen was not an accurate representation of the actual chair. It was a deep brown color and it was in less pristine condition than the ad had suggested. It had several stains and the cushions were askew in a way that didn’t seem fixable - the padding had slipped inside the fabric.

When I asked about the chair’s age and manufacturer, the owner told me that not only was there no clue about the maker on the chair, but that this had been a hand-me-down item from her parents who had left all their furniture behind in favor of a fresh start when they retired to their new condo in Boca Raton. She said the chair was maybe six years old, but it seemed like it might have been much older. As I inspected the chair, the woman was casually telling me all about her husband’s work and why the house was in such an uproar and about the renovations they had undertaken and about her several dogs - one of which was a chihuahua who was losing its tiny mind behind a nearby door - and about how her son would soon be in college and once he was, how he’d be living in this house while she and her husband moved to Costa Rica because her man could do his consulting work from anywhere in the world. While she was talking, I was willing my nose to accurately ascertain if the animal smell was coming directly from the chair itself or whether it was sort of just hanging in the air inside the whole house.

I decided I needed backup, so I excused myself from the woman, made my way past the porch full of wind chimes, candles, plants, and a four foot buddha statue to pow-wow with Chris who was waiting with the sleeping baby in the car. This is how he set me straight:

ME: “Honey, can you come up and take a look at this chair? I’m not sure about it and I need your opinion.”

HIM: “Well, what’re you thinking?”

ME: “It’s darker than I thought, and… well, I can’t tell if it’s the house or the chair that smells like animals.”

HIM: “Um, no. I don’t need to see the chair. You’ve just told me all I need to know right there, babe.”

ME: “What do you mean?”

HIM: “It doesn’t really matter if it’s the chair that stinks or if it’s the house that stinks, does it? You said it smells like dog, so yeah. That’s a no.”

Sometimes it takes a third party perspective to snap me out of my wild-eyed and hopeful Craigslist hunter mode. There hadn’t been many possibilities and I’d been looking soooo long that I just really wanted it to work, but he was totally right. If it wasn’t immediately apparent that this was a clean, well-kept chair, I should’ve just moved on and chalked it up to a wasted trip. Thank goodness he was there with me.

So anyway, I thanked the woman for her time and for dragging her chair into her half-finished foyer for me, but told her that the chair wasn’t going to work for us, which was totally true…

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Stay tuned for Chair Search, Part 2, coming soon to a computer screen near you, where I venture into downtown Atlanta with a 16 month old in tow. Awesome!