Capitalist Excess

I think it would be fair to say that Daniel and I are not huge consumers when it comes to household furniture and decor.  Most of what we have has been given to us (because we're lucky to have crafty and/or generous people in our family).  I can count on three fingers the new items of furniture we've bought in the sixteen years we've been married; a bed frame that we bought with money that we were given when we got married, a spare bed when we finally got a house that had two bedrooms, and a couch that we bought a couple of years ago when we realised that we just weren't up to sitting on a futon anymore (we donated that to a refugee family who really needed it). Most of our extra money is spent on trips home, entertaining friends, my gardening habit, and Daniel's bicycling habit.

I think Spring Madness got to us, though, because we sallied forth last weekend to buy a new telly.  The one we had was 20 years old, and had a very small screen.  It wasn't even HDTV capable (although we got a little box of electronics to solve that problem when all TV went to high definition a few years ago).

Soooo... we ventured forth and got ourselves a new one.  Since a lot of what we watch is movies, we decided on a larger screen.  We also decided on one that is web-ready so we can stream our movies from Netflix (which is where we rent our movies from).  This is actually a good thing in that we won't be using up resources having the Netflix people deliver DVDs to us; it's all dots and pixels flying over the airwaves.

These new tellys aren't cheap.  Once you buy the actual TV, you also have to buy a whole bunch of other stuff so you can connect it to the DVD player and stereo, and on and on.... nothing in the world of electronics is cheap anymore, it seems.  If we had a firstborn child I'm sure they would have asked for it.

And I have to say, if you really want to feel like the world has passed you by, just go out and by some electronics.  It's all changed so much that I am now officially clueless.

So anyway we got the thing, and then we had to get something to put it on.  Our old TV had quite happily sat on a small wire table thingy (I guess that's piece of furniture number four) that I believe I bought for the princely sum of $20 when we rented our first house.  Said table thingy is now hosting my Draecena....

I had to move the Draecena because everything in the living room had to be rearranged to accommodate the TV, but it seems to be doing okay in its new spot.  I love that plant!  It was maybe 10 centimetres tall when I got it, and now it's at least a metre tall - in spite of being ravaged by the furry folk as revenge for me leaving them on one of my trips home.

We looked and looked and looked for some sort of purpose-designed TV table (we didn't want a cabinet), and were failing miserably in our mission.  They were really, really ugly, the wrong wood, the wrong style, overpriced... you get the idea.  And I was adamant that I didn't want anything with a dark finish.  I thought our house was too small for dark, monumental pieces of furniture. And let me be frank here; our house is so small that even a teacup can look monumental.

We finally stumbled across something at a furniture clearance center.  It wasn't a purpose-designed TV table, but I'm very happy with what we found:

I know, I know... it's a very dark finish (the official term is "chocolate"), which I suspect I won't hear the end of, but it's pretty groovy and fits in surprisingly well with our 1930s house for all that it's very modern. And it really doesn't dominate our little house at all, which was quite a surprise.  If we ever get around to refinishing the floors and fixing the mantlepiece around the fireplace, the living room will look quite fancy!

It's actually a buffet, and it was made in Canada (which is only a long day's drive from here). The top drawer is even felt lined for cutlery. Daniel drilled a few holes in the back of it for all the cables and we were able to fit all our stereo gear and the DVD player in the main cabinet.

Here's a detail:

There's a really nifty switch on the back of it that you tap a time or two to switch on the lights in the side cabinets so you can show off your crafty family's gifts that they've given you over the years. Pretty fancy schmancy!

Best of all, we got it for two thirds off the original asking price.  Can't say fairer than that!

Now all I have to do is figure out how to work the telly....