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Used Sofas: Why Buying New is Simply Better

Published by Clive Braude on 27th Oct 2015

Old Couch

With the expense involved in purchasing new furniture, it can be cost prohibitive to consider buying every item from the store. There are certainly used items that can provide good value and will save you money on the spot, but a sofa is the kind of furniture piece you may not want to skimp on. Whether you’ve recently found a piece you’re interested in or you’re combing the classifieds, here are some reasons a used sofa may not be the best idea.

It’s Out of Style

An older piece of clothing that still stuns may be vintage, but an item like a sofa can reveal its age in ways that might not be so desirable. With what is hip and trendy in design changing on a seasonal basis, a sofa from ten or fifteen years ago can look aged in plenty of ways that don’t even relate to fabric, from its shape to its overall bulk. While a sofa with clean lines can certainly work, a sizeable, fabric-heavy model of years past may simply degrade the look of your room and may not make up for the money saved in the process.

It May Not Be Comfortable

A sofa may look plush and comfy in an online image, but the sofa you’ll be sitting on in real life may actually feel quite a bit different when you have the ability to try it out for yourself. One of the upsides of purchasing a sofa in person is that you’ll be able to test it out before you buy it and make sure it’s comfortable for everyone, whereas a sofa scouted online may be something you have to commit to before you even have the option to test it out. It might be worth spending the extra money at a furniture store to be able to try out a couch at your leisure, and not feel pressured into a purchase.

In the Event of Re-Covering

While a material like leather will certainly wear a lot better than cotton or wool, if you’re considering a sofa that you’ll have to reupholster in order to bring it up to grade, it might not be worth the effort. The problem with many fabric couches is that you don’t know what kind of calamities have befallen such an item. While coffee stains and spaghetti sauce may have been washed out, these things can still give off odd odours since they’ll remain engrained in the sofa’s fibres. If there’s any chance that you might change the fabric, the purchase of a new couch may end up costing about the same by the time it’s been recovered.

There are many used items that can be purchased online without regret, but a sofa can be one of those pieces that’s just too much of a risk to consider buying it used. As styles go out of fashion so fast and what you see isn’t always what you get, it might be worth it to spend a bit more and get something that will be entirely your own.