TV Dilemma

One day in late summer Ben called me to say that Tim had told him about a special deal on a TV at Fry's, and he wanted me to go check it out. Turns out it was a 50 inch wide-screen TV, and the price was excellent. There was only one left, so I had to buy it right away and figure out how to get it home, rather than pay a delivery fee. I called our friend Jim, who has a pickup truck, and asked him to meet me at Fry's, but while I was waiting for him I figured out that it would actually fit in my Matrix with the seats folded down. So Jim met me at home and helped me unload it into the house. There the real drama began.

Our previous TV was much smaller than 50 inches and fit perfectly into the entertainment center that we had in our den. The new TV is a giant and doesn't fit into anything that we have. (Notice that the old TV is actually not there any more, since Robyn jumped on the opportunity to get a bigger set in her apt. and took the old one!)




I told Ben from the start that we would have to get new furniture to fit the new TV, and he agreed that we could do that. He just didn't quite know how much new furniture was going to cost....somewhat diminishing the great price we got on the TV! So we unpacked the new TV and put it the only place we could manage--perched on two chairs in the corner of the den.



And there it remained, until this past weekend.

We have done some shopping for a new entertainment center, but it's been difficult. We went to IKEA first, having found something acceptable in their catalog. However, we found something even better on their showroom floor, but it was all out-of-stock. When we asked when they would be getting more in, we were told that that particular line was being discontinued and would not, in fact, be restocked. And the line that we had originally seen in the catalog was also out-of-stock. So we went to some other furniture stores, but there was absolutely nothing that looked like something we'd want to put in our house.

I was telling Susan about all of this, and she brought up the idea of looking for some unfinished furniture. Bingo! There's a place called Bald Furniture not too far from us, and they will build a unit to our specifications and finish it in whatever color we choose. Alas, there is a catch. It will end up costing around 3 times as much as the IKEA out-of-stock stuff (which, by the way, doesn't look so good any more since I've seen the Bald Furniture stuff!). So we find ourselves at an impasse.

I finally suggested to Ben that we needed to do SOMETHING about the TV perched on the chairs, especially since that corner is typically where our Christmas tree goes...so we rearranged the unit that we had, separating the two pieces and moving one to our bedroom (I didn't take a before picture in there, but trust me, this looks MUCH better!).



The remaining piece was emptied and turned on its side to create a surface for the big TV.


Now the biggest issue is what to do with all the extraneous electronics that came out of that entertainment center, many of which we rarely or never use any more...I wonder how long they'll stay in this pile on the den floor?