When we first arrived in Arizona in January, we naturally brought very little with us as a piece of furniture has to be an antique or a work of art to be worth sending across an ocean. We got rid of all of our furniture on Gumtree the week before we left the UK. This was sensible, but it meant we had to replace everything locally. As I had actually not planned to live in the US again when Chris and I first got married, I didn’t do anything to maintain a US credit rating, so we have had to build it up slowly, nearly from scratch in my case and entirely from scratch in Chris’s case. Even though fairly reasonable financing is available from most US furniture stores, we were not eligible for any of it in January.
We discovered Cort Furniture, which bought us some time. They rent nearly anything you could need to fill a house. They are rarely used by individuals, but more frequently by companies who need to set up some foreign workers on short notice. We discovered them after buying a mattress out of pocket, but before attempting to buy a sofa, so we rented that in addition to some office chairs and a headboard for the bed.
This was very useful, but due to the items being reused, it limits the kinds of things they rent out. Ever since we stayed with our friends in North Carolina, Chris had wanted a sofa that was a bit more involved. We went to Ashley Furniture, a Wisconsin based company that sold us our truly superb mattress, and had a look around. They did indeed have the complicated sort of sofa Chris wanted. We now have a sofa with a USB console in the center. It is considered a love seat, but what it really is is two connected reclining rocking chairs. It’s definitely more complicated than the model we were renting from Cort. Ashley were also a good place to get a headboard, but they aren’t a place for a proper office chair. Their chairs were all basically more intended to look nice than be sat in for the 8 hours a day required for working from home.
We had a look at in person office stores, but in the end, it was Amazon. They really do sell everything, and as Prime members, shipping was free of course, even being two enormous office chairs. They were even Amazon’s own brand of office chairs. They weren’t too bad to build and so far seem like better chairs than the ones we had from Cort. The Cort ones weren’t terrible, but like the sofa, just a bit on the basic side.
Here is a short video: