Random Story – Disposing of a couch

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Many years ago, to save money a couple friends and I got an apartment together.  I think the one guy’s sister had a couch she was getting rid of and gave it to us.  It was starting to break down, but it still worked as a couch.  A couple years later, we all went our own way, and nobody else wanted the couch so I ended up with it.  I moved it to my new apartment, and over the years it broke down even more.

Some years later, when I moved out, I needed to get rid of the couch.  But how?  The complex where I lived had eight or nine apartment buildings, and between all of them were four or five fenced off areas with a dumpster and recycling bins.  There were signs around the fence about how you weren’t allowed to dump things like TVs or couches.  So I stopped in at the office and asked how to get rid of a couch, and they said I’d have to call the garbage company and make arraignments.  And there was a fee, like $30 or something. 

As I walked back to my apartment, I wondered if I would need to take an afternoon off work because they would be there “Between 1:00 and 5:00.” I also wondered if they would take it out of my apartment or if I would have to get it to the dumpster.  And if I got it to the dumpster, how would they know it was mine?  Despite the signs, over the years I had seen a few mattresses and such set near the dumpster.  These usually stayed there for a few weeks, probably until the complex ponied up the $30 to get rid of them.

After some thought, I decided to do something else.  I took the cushions off and put them in a garbage bag.  With my pocket knife, I then cut off all the padding from the back and arms, and filled a couple more garbage bags.  I was then left with a wooden frame with some metal brackets and springs, probably a third of them broken.  For the next day or so, I’d watched TV and when a commercial came on I’d take a screwdriver and work on taking all the metal pieces off. 

I had a little saw, which was really for small craft projects, like cutting quarter inch balsa wood, not the inch thick whatever wood this couch was made out of.  But for the next week or so, whenever a commercial would come on I’d start sawing.  And it probably took me a couple commercial breaks to make a complete cut.  I think there was also one board that had a crack most of the way through it, so I just smacked it with a hammer a few times to finish the break.

It took me a week or so to disassemble my couch into seven or eight garbage bags, which I took out to the dumpster over the next month.  But I got rid of my couch and saved $30.  And years later, I got a blog post out of it.