Couch before and after

It's debatable as to whether or not you can call yourself a true Houstonian (<---great link, that one!) if you've never bought a piece of furniture from Jim McIngvale. 

The man whom Houston Press called a "bellowing freak" represents the American Dream on a Houston scale (he even has his own IMDB page, even though I don't think the obvious movie has been made just yet).  This piece quotes the now-defunct Houston Post as having described his cultural influence as follows:

There are some events in our life we never forget.  Our first kiss.  The day Elvis died.  The landing on the moon.  The first time we saw Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale jumping up and down in a Gallery Furniture television commercial, shaking a fist full of dollars and hollering something about "saving you moneeey".

I actually do remember the first time I ever saw Mattress Mack on TV.  Upon seeing his commercial, my exact first words were, "What the F&%$ just happened?!"
:-)

And I have consumed the proverbial Kool-Aid several times over my 20-odd year Houston tenure, mostly in the years before Mattress Mack started, shall we say, hitting a superior style stride, as the following example will demonstrate. 

I admit to having been completely suckered by his frequent 1990's bellowing sales pitch regarding Mayo furniture (or was that "Ma-Ma-Ma-MAYO FURNITURE!!!") as being particularly appropriate for "big and tall" people because of its extra-robust construction and resulting durability. 

None of us in my family are big or tall in any euphemistic senses of the words, but I was about six months pregnant when I bought our living room couch, and I wanted something that many children could jump on with impunity.  I have a general rule about furniture:  If you can't dance on it, it's not sufficiently durable, so don't bother to buy it.  I didn't ever want to find myself in the position of bellowing, "No jumping on the furniture!" when, in fact, that's something that kids are supposed to do.

So I bought this gigantic houseboat of a Mayo couch from Mack, except there was just one North Freeway-type problem:

It was uglier than sin even before they promised to "deliver it tonight".  How should we describe the particular esthetic represented by this cushion, anyway?  Jackson Pollock meets Native American knock-off?  This type of thing was in style for maybe five minutes during the year 1990 (or maybe it was 1989).  It was out of style years before Mack even offered this particular beauty for sale, so please don't think that I lived with the likes of this in my house for any amount of time.  I bought the couch because I liked the base upholstery color and knew that I would re-upholster all the back cushions immediately.  For this photo above, I had just stripped off my first-generation re-upholstery so I could show you this a-a-amazing original fabric that was still underneath it. 
 

More than a dozen years ago, I re-did the complete set of back cushions using upholstery that was high-end but fairly traditional in appearance.  Since that time, both my tastes and the current trends have favored more transitional to contemporary decor styles.  So last week when I re-did those cushions a second time, this was the result:

What initially drew me to this couch was the unusual green upholstery which was not that godawful hunter green that was also in style for five minutes during 1990, and neither was it really very teal.  It is an odd luminescent green that had strong aqua undertones.  I added this Pier 1 throw which has even more aqua...

...but what we really like the best is this contemporary fabric which now covers two of the four biggest back cushions.  It ties together every other color in our great room: the base fabric on the couch itself, the neutral floor tiles, the green grass outside the windows and - yes - the blues that echo provocatively down the newly-painted skylight...   

...such as this blue shade, for instance (from this post).

In every epic home design story, there has to come an element of heartbreak, however, and here's where mine arises: 

I had gotten that perfect piece of contemporary print upholstery at Garden Ridge Pottery in Webster at NASA 1 and IH-45 about six months to a year ago.  With our hectic family schedule, it took me a number of months to to actually find the time to sew these new cushion covers.  Before doing so, I said to myself, "I better check Garden Ridge one more time to see if they have gotten in any new stuff that I like even better." 

Alas, I arrived at Garden Ridge only to find it completely re-arranged (why do retailers do that?!), with the treasure trove of upholstery remnants nowhere to be found. 

Hands down, Garden Ridge offered the best upholstery remnants anywhere in Clear Lake.  It was high quality stuff, and most of it sold for an incredible six dollars per each two-yard piece.  If you know anything about upholstery, you know that the good quality material is extremely expensive.  That print piece I used on our couch would probably have originally sold in the range of $50 to $100 per yard.  I paid $6 for a two-yard remnant of it at Garden Ridge.  From a remnant stack that I can no longer find and that might have been discontinued.

Here is a screengrab from this site showing what I'm talking about.  We live in a society that runs on spin-doctored euphemisms, don't we??  I interpret "pre-cut" to mean "remnant".

In my opinion, most of the stuff in Garden Ridge is fairly useless low-end mass-produced merchandise (what I tend to call "Cheap Sh*t from China").  The fabric was one of the few things in the store that could actually be used to craft something of quality. 

Six whole dollars.  Together with the other two fabrics I used, I made-over our trusty ancient houseboat couch for less than fifty bucks (the only reason why the cost was even that high is that the dark grey fabric is a high-end coarse linen that was about $50 per yard... I obtained that stuff from Hancock on El Camino Real, not from Garden Ridge).  These couches with the loose pillows along the back... they are not the height of style anymore, but their look can be transformed literally for pocket change.  In this manner, they really can "SSSSAVE YOU MONEEEYYYYY!!"

Hopefully this remnant stack will turn up again somewhere in that behemoth store.  If not, maybe I'll chalk it up to being yet another casualty of a Houston-style heyday.