Digital Brainwaves

Yvonne and I have a sofa bed.

When we first started dating, I didn’t have a very big apartment, and thus had no room for a bed bigger than my existing twin size bottom-half-of-a-bunk-bed, so I got a used sleeper sofa from a friend for cheap. It proved to be rather uncomfortable to sleep on after a while, so we got a new one from Pottery Barn back in June 2006, which has served us quite well.

It’s built like most sleeper sofas are: the fold out bed frame has springs connecting trampoline-like to a canvas panel, upon which sits the mattress. At the top of the canvas, where the fold-up head section is, the canvas wraps around a thin metal rod, around which there are hooks that connect the top back to the bed frame.

Over the last few months, the metal rod has torn its way completely out of the canvas, leaving the panel completely unconnected on the top edge of the bed. Not very safe, and subtracts from the comfort level, as to avoid putting my head up too far where there’s no support for it, my feet now hang off the foot of the bed.

I live in a bigger apartment now, and as such, we’re in the process of getting a nice king-size bed — a real bed, not a sleeper sofa we have to pull out every night and put away again in the morning. We’d planned to check in with Pottery Barn about the problem with the sofabed, but we never remembered to bring the documentation for it to the store when we were out, so we only got around to doing anything about it today.

Since it was more than a year since the original purchase date, we assumed based on some of the paperwork we had that it was out of warranty. Yvonne was prepared to try to fix it with duct tape (hey, if it works on a Volkswagen…), but wanted to check in with PB and see if we could order replacement parts.

So Brian at the store called the Pottery Barn Design Studio and asked if we could order parts. Short answer: No.

“When was it ordered again?” the studio asked. “No, that’s still in warranty.”

OK, so maybe they’ll send a “furniture doctor” or something to repair it.

“No no, that’s a manufacturing defect. We’ll replace it.”

“The canvas?”

“No, all of it.”

“Oh, okay, the whole sleeper sofa part?”

“No, the sofa.”

*jawdrop*

“Oh, uh, okay… we can work with that…”

They won’t be able to get it to us until January 7th, but they’ll replace the whole thing.

Apparently, I still didn’t get what “the whole thing” meant.

“So, this is just the sofa, not the pseudo-suede slipcovers, right?”

No. The whole thing. New sofa, new sleeper, new mattress, new cushions, new slipcovers.

———

Yvonne was worried she’d overpaid for the new bed a few weeks ago, buying it in-store rather than online, ’cause the prices online turned out to be lower. I think we’re okay with it, on the whole, though, considering the service we got on on the sofa over a year later.