When’s The Right Time To Invest In Nice Things?

Should we stop picking up chairs off the street?

Aside from a bookshelf and a dresser with a defunct bottom drawer, I do not own any furniture that I’ve bought myself. Everything in my room is a cast-off from someone else — usually a departing roommate moving on to co-habitate with their partners. The couch in the living room is new in the sense that we actually paid money for it. “It’s nice!” my sister told me in a text right before she got it. “They’ve only had it for a couple of months.” It’s an Ikea sofa that we paid $100 for and at this point, it’s probably the nicest piece of furniture that we own.

I have put off buying nice furniture for a time in the nebulous future: when I live alone; when the cat no longer scratches the sofa; when I can afford it. Like replacing all the pots and pans in my kitchen with ones that aren’t scratched and flaking Teflon, buying nicer and more expensive furniture is something that I’ll do later, when I’ve reached some undefined next step in the future. A nice couch — deep and soft, a sectional, maybe? — sounds like a luxury that I don’t quite deserve just yet. A dresser made of something other than particleboard and plastic would be nice, too, but whenever I find something I like, the price always stops me cold. I am finally starting to understant that quality isn’t necessarily cheap, but paying $300 or more for a dresser feels like an unncessary luxury that I cannot afford.

If I socked away a little extra money each month, in a little bit, I could buy something nice, maybe a new bedside table or a lamp that doesn’t lean wearily to the left. I could use a new bookshelf, or maybe a desk chair that doesn’t make my lower back throb in agony. Maybe this time around, I’ll buy something nice and new, something that feels good and correct instead of just fine. Waiting for some moment where it’s acceptable to buy something nice is clearly a waste of time. I should just buy the furniture and be happy.

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