What do you consider "must-have" furniture in your home?
For me it would be the following:
- beds
- comfortable place to sit (couch or sofa)
- dining table and chairs
- reading lamps
Everything else seems optional to me.
Items I would like to have (and do have) in addition to the "must haves":
- desk(s)
- ottoman
- bookshelf
I even have items in addition to these. But there are also a lot of furniture items I don't have.
For example...
- We don't have dressers. Ok...I have one that is an antique and was handed down to me from my grandparents. It's small and has two drawers that hold my off-season clothes. The rest of us use shelves and baskets in the closet for things that would normally go in a dresser.
- We don't have a coffee table. Instead we have an ottoman that opens up and doubles as storage space.
- We don't have traditional end tables. I use a basket with a removable lid as one end table and use a slim telephone stand as another. The ONLY reason I use the telephone table is so I can put a lamp next to the futon for reading and extra light.
- We don't have night stands.
- We don't have accent chairs.
Like everything else, excess furniture can quickly clutter up your living space. Because we have lived in 11 different homes in the past 17 years, I have critiqued each piece of furniture we own and evaluated it's use in our home. If it isn't useful or needed, then out it goes!
I also try to make my furniture pull double-duty when possible. Our home isn't large and we dont' have a guest bedroom. When guests come, we have a futon that doubles as a bed. Even our new school desks can be used as extra space for eating when guests are here if necessary.
So how about you? Do you have furniture you don't really need?
To see all the posts in this series, search by the label less is more or click on THIS PAGE.
When we moved from an RV into an apartment we had no furniture other than 1 wood TV tray. After much research we ordered everything we thought we needed from IKEA for, I think, just over $2000 and had it delivered right to the apartment so no moving van. We bought 2 twin beds that could be pushed together to make a king, 2 short chests of drawers that we use as night stands, 2 Poang chairs with footstools and a file cabinet to go between them to hold my lamp, 1 desk with rolling office chair, 1 low entertainment center for Dave's big screen TV for watching movies, and 1 table with 4 chairs. We put the TV tray in the front hall to hold keys and outgoing things. Yes, we once again have books but they go on the desk or a nightstand. If we move all the chairs into the living room and use the footstools we can seat 9 people before anyone has to sit on the floor. 12 if we bring in our camping chairs from the RV. In the two years we've lived here we have not needed anything more but everything we have gets used every day.
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