Living Room v.2.0 and Early Christmas

A few weeks ago, Kenji and I started messing around with our living room's furniture arrangement. It used to look something sort of like it did in this post, except for add a coffee table in the middle, minus the rocking chair, and make the love seat flat up against the wall, instead of at an angle. Anyway, it didn't seem a very cozy welcoming arrangement, so finally we decided to move some stuff around.

Our final result is what you see here to the right, but we must have had two or three other arrangements in between. Our big challenge was that we really can't place any furniture flat up against three of the four walls in our living room because they all have some kind of doorway or archway leading into other rooms. We also wanted to make room for a TV that we didn't own yet. The only thing that would work wound up with us placing everything at an angle.

Oh yeah so anyway, Christmas came early at our house this year, because last Saturday we finally decided to buy a television. We already had a television, but it's a little 13-inch that Kenji has had for the past nine years. We've been sort of looking around at TVs for the last couple years, waiting for prices on flat panels to come down enough. We're very glad we didn't buy the 23-inch LCD TV that we saw a couple years ago at Shirokiya for $2,600. Instead we bought a 40-inch, for a whole lot less money. Someday we might even spring for cable or Direct TV.

We also needed to get something for the TV to sit on, preferably something that would fit in a corner. Pretty much all the TV stands we saw at the TV stores were butt-ugly. Instead we went to a little store called Far-Fetched, which is an independently owned Pier-1-ish furniture store. They have a lot of really cool, and somewhat expensive furniture items. When we walked in the door, we saw the red version of this nice modular bookshelf and drawer set. While it was on the expensive side, we considered it a possibility because of its flexibility in terms of how it can be arranged. The only problem was it had two sliding doors in the front of the bookshelf part, where we would want to keep our DVD and stereo equipment. It must have been our lucky day, because upstairs in the store we found the same piece, but in the right color, marked down by 50% because the sliding doors (that we didn't need anyway) had gotten warped somewhere in transit from China to New Jersey! So now we have something to put our TV on, and our kitty cat in, that is far more attractive than your average TV stand. Plus the door panels look pretty cool - we might even use them as wall-hangings.