Today I focused my attention on the house. I started by cleaning the kitchen because when the kitchen is clean everything else seems more possible. The rest of the day was spent organizing my office and the storage room. We’re planning to start producing merchandise other than books and I really need a place to put it all. The time has come for my office to eschew doubling as a guest room and admit that it is just an office. The futon has been evicted and shelves were put up instead. I’m still not done in there, but it is a start.
The futon is currently taking up space in the family room. Howard and I had discussed putting it in the front room, but after watching the antics today I don’t want it there. The kids were all very excited about the new family room furniture. First they discovered that if they hit the mattress, dust came puffing out. Then they discovered that they could lift it into a bed or fold it into a couch. This was highly amusing to them and highly nerve wracking to me. I kept hearing Thump-CRASH as they switched it back and forth. The frame of the futon is metal and made a lovely CLANG sound. I could just picture smashed limbs and I forbade them to fold it out anymore. I declared it to be a couch and only a couch.
But this was not the end of the fascination with the futon. The kids discovered that if they pushed the mattress out of the way, the back of the couch configuration made a great jail. They would stand on the mattress with their backs against the slats. Their hands would be shoved behind them through the slats as if they’d been handcuffed. We had four neighbor kids over and this whole elaborate game evolved including the jail, a jailer, and 6 kids all being pokemon, or unicorns, or whatever. It was cute to see them all lined up there, but extremely chaotic and noisy.
They climbed. They jumped. They argued. Fortunately no damage was done to either futon or kids, but it was a close thing multiple times. I think the futon needs a new home and we need to invest in an airbed for guests.
Or possibly move it to the play ground if the danger is more to the other furniture than the kids….
We have a futon couch that I’ve had for about twelve years, but it has a design flaw: the frame only latches into the flat “bed” position, not the raised “couch” position. (I didn’t realize this until after I’d bought it, or I wouldn’t have bought that model.) Getting the couch to stay up requires either placing it against a wall, or strapping the frame into the raised position with nylon tie-wraps. Then, once the frame is strapped or braced into couch position, if you have active small people who couldn’t sit still short of encasing them in concrete bouncing and climbing about on it all the time, the mattress tends to slide down and bunch up unless tied in place with parachute cord. So then you have a futon couch which can’t be used as a couch without first untying the mattress, unstrapping the frame, and moving it away from the wall. At which point it’s hardly worth bothering, especially since I never really found it very comfortable to sleep on anyway.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I wouldn’t buy another.
Evicting furniture
If you need to get rid of the futon all together, I recommend FreeCycle. My wife and I had a rocking chair about a month ago that we passed along to a stranger in need in the space of about 36 hours through our local FreeCycle group. We love their model: giving or asking only, no buying, selling, or trading. We’ve been on both ends and really enjoyed it. And since you’re in an area with not one but two universities, there must be no shortage of starving students in need of a decent futon!