off and saw the wizard

So, apparently, way back in the day, all American-made furniture was made in the vicinity of Hickory and High Point North Carolina, and the towns around them. These days, those same companies that used to exclusively produce in the area still maintain clearance centers, outlets, and a variety of other stores in those towns, and whether the furniture is made in good old US of A or in some itch-mongering factory in China, you can get it at a pretty darned good price in the area.
So, for the sake of re-equipping our living room and some other minor pieces of furniture throughout the house, Better Half and I took a jaunt over to western North Carolina this weekend, and spent most of it poking around the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of square feet of furniture marts. Talk about information overload… And, honestly, one would think that that much absurdly ugly furniture in one place would cause a rift in the space-time continuum or something.
A few hints for future furniture shoppers headed to that district… First, if you are looking for something with relatively clean lines, no overstuffing, no “pudge factor”, no recliners, and not looking like it came out of a victorian museum… you are looking in the wrong place. Second, if you are looking for a living room set that will set you back less than about a grand or even a grand-and-a-half (for a couch, loveseat, chair, and ottoman), boy are you in the wrong spot, overstocks, discontinueds, or not. Third, furniture shopping is definitely a you-get-what-you-pay-for situation – if you want reversable cushions, you are going to pay for it. If you want good foam, you are going to pay for it. If you want eight-way hand-tied springs, boy are you going to pay for it. Fourth, if you see it, and want it, buy it. This is only really applicable to clear-out stores, where what they have on the floor is all they have, and where quantities may be limited to just one, but I am speaking from experience. Better Half and I found what could have been our couch, but we were not 100% about the color, so we slept on it, went back to the store the next day, and it was gone. Unfortunately, that was the only luck we had (our search parameters are somewhat narrow), but we did use the weekend to learn a great deal about the furniture market, our tastes, and how no one is really making anything that matches them these days. Fifth, Broyhill makes some decent stuff, at a reasonable price – as long as you can catch it on sale or discounted for some reason.
Yeah, we are pretty cheap. And I just cannot see paying a grand-and-a-half or two for a single couch. But, at the same time, we want quality… which is why we came home with nothing yet – we have not yet found an acceptable intersect between cost and value.
However, one of the nights we spent over in North Carolina was in a little place called Statesville, and Better Half and I stumbled upon the most fascinating collapsed business front. We could not really decide what it was – judging from some of the wide doors, we initially thought it might have been a car shop, but then we got farther in and realized the floor was set up for a surprisingly large number of toilets and showers. In the end, we concluded we had no idea what it was, and just took pictures. The best (in my opinion) are below, though you will have to forgive me for abusing Picasa’s photo-editing capabilities. Overenthusiastic I am.





Enjoy!