About 12 or 13 years ago, I was working for a church that had an annual Fall Festival that included a fundraising rummage sale. Toward the end of the sale I noticed that there was a decent-looking sofa that had not been claimed. It wasn’t an amazing piece of furniture, but it was good enough for someone to purchase.
Now, I said I was working for the church; it’s more accurate to say I was running the church and, therefore, the sale. I could easily have set aside pretty much anything I wanted before any guests showed up for the sale, but we wanted people to be able to come and shop for things they needed, so I usually waited until later in the day to buy things from the sale. This sofa had been priced at a fair amount – I think about $80 or $90 – but it sat there all day with little or no interest.
I was busy all day so I didn’t pay much attention to what was selling (or not), but at the end of the day, I did a walkthrough to see what was left. We had a room upstairs that we had converted into a year-round sale room, so we would move most of the rest there that evening. However, big items (like sofas) were too large for the space, so they had to find a different destination. Sure enough, the sofa was one of those items, and I asked the person in charge of the sale what his plans were for the sofa. He said, “If you want it, how does $30 sound?” It sounded perfect to me, so I talked with my wife and she agreed that, while this probably wasn’t the final solution for our living room, it would be a suitable fill-in for the damaged sofa that needed to go. By that evening, this black-and-white patterned sofa was sitting in our family room.
Now, 12 to 13 years later, that sofa has survived the test of time. I got it in the division of furniture in my divorce (not that my ex-wife put up a fight), and I’m sitting on it as I write this post. It’s even survived several dogs, including my precious Princess, who spent a couple of years thinking that the cushions were giant chew toys. We’ve replaced the seating cushions with a large piece of memory foam, and that’s required a new cover that closely matches the original. But after more than a decade, this is probably the best $30 I’ve ever spent.
