Living Room Fiasco

This is the current view of my living room. There's a few problems with it, and it's bothering me:

1. It's empty. We've been without any furniture for about 3 days now.
2. It's not quite going in the direction I want it to go. The carpet? All wrong. The picture above the fireplace? Donation from my mom, and it's nice, but not really what I want for the space.
3. The lack of any decorations.

"Why has your living room been empty for 3 days?" one might ask.

Well, to begin with, I finally got rid of our couch after massively reducing the price. To put that disappointment into perspective, we bought that couch less than a year ago for about $1200. I sold it for $600. We went back to the place where we purchased it and saw a sale price of $1500. Need I say more?

So, with a measly $600 to work with, we've been running all over town trying to find a new couch that isn't a POS, isn't ugly, is comfortable, and fits the style I'm aiming for. So far we've found absolutely nothing that fits that criteria. This is what we HAVE found, though:

It's comfortable, looks good, and it's well within our budget. Problem: it's kind of straying far away from the "calm" and "soothing" look that I was hoping for.

The website also shows it in this Grain color, which would be wonderful!

Except that, in the store, it's a completely different couch. How annoying is that? The arms aren't the same, the cushions aren't the same - nothing is the same! Even the color is different.

Then there's this brown guy. If you buy the sofa, you get the matching chair for $75. All of that would still be within our budget.

Problem: Not a fan of how it looks. It's a pretty blah couch.

So then, we get to this sucker.

Beautiful? Yes. It comes in a very light tan, or even a light blue that might actually look pretty nice with our wall color. Problem: $300 over budget not including tax.


Our last option comes down to a couch that my parents own. It used to be my couch, back when I lived with them and had my own sitting room. It's by far the cheapest option (possibly free?) and would allow us to buy some cool chairs and still have money leftover.

This is the best picture I have of it. Problem: it's very aqua and our living room walls are very blue. The potential for having those two colors clash is very high. And I'm pretty positive that Tom would kill me if I suggested re-painting the living room.



So, since I seem to be hitting a dead-end no matter what, we continue to sit here, couchless. I mentioned to Tom that we could just skip the couch altogether and live like the Chinese. but he didn't really seem to be a fan of that idea.