As you may remember, at the end of the last column I had decided it was time to get a new living room suite.

The old furniture still looked fine. In fact, it would probably look fine forever. This would teach me not to buy fabric which wore like iron. But the fact it still looked good meant we would have no trouble finding it a new home. I’m with furniture like some people are with pets. I can’t get rid of it until someone else agrees to give it a good home.

“This stuff isn’t that old,” Bill argued.

“Some of the kids still lived here when we bought it over 15 years ago,” I countered.

He thought about it for a brief moment and said, “Okay, get whatever you want, but no new carpet. This still has plenty of good wear in it, and there’s no way I’m moving all this stuff out so they can lay new carpet.”

I just smiled and began to try to decide what we wanted. I looked through some ads and catalogs and talked to family and friends.

Just about the time Bill thought I had come to my senses I said, “C’mon we need to go to the furniture store.”

“Where do you get this ‘we’ stuff? The furniture we have is fine for me. We just got a new loveseat and a new computer desk.”

The next day we went to the furniture store. We walked through the whole store looking at and sitting on every sofa. They no longer make the kind I like—the same style as the one I was tired of. So I told Bill to pick whatever style he liked — anything but Early American. That is all we had for the child rearing years.

Shortly thereafter he picked the style he liked, Early American. I could understand why. We’re tall people. We really do need the high-backed Early American for comfort.

I already knew how to pick the fabric. I went to the racks of samples and picked out all the ones I thought we could live with. There was a healthy stack. Then I spread them three at a time on the back of the sofa style we chose. We picked the one we liked best out of the three and put it aside, returning rejects to the racks. We did that until we were down to three to choose from. We brought those three home to see how they looked in our house.

It didn’t take much time to see whatever fabric we chose we’d have to repaint all the walls.

Well it didn’t take me long to see that. It took about a week for Bill to see it. His eyesight improved when our oldest son who now has a painting business insisted we should pick out the paint and he’d do the work — for free.

“You’ll move the furniture, cover the carpet, and patch the dings, all of it?” my husband inquired.

“All of it!” our son assured him.

“Okay, bring in the samples,” Bill ordered.

A few days later our son returned with two huge books of paint samples.

“What are we supposed to do with these?” his dad asked.

“Choose three colors you like, tell me the numbers, and I’ll bring you a sample can of each. Then you can paint a section of wall in each of the colors, look at them for a while and then tell me which one you want.”

I agreed. It made sense to me. So I began to look through the paint chips. There were hundreds of them. “The fabric swatch is over there. What color would you recommend?” I asked.

“Dover white,” he said confidently.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s a great neutral color, and I have gallons of it.”

I found the Dover White chip, looked at it, and said, “I’ll get back to you.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column was first published in the Greenville Advocate on March 15, 2000.