Le canapé est arrivé

Back in October, when we again started spending a lot of time at home — and indoors — we realized that a year without having a sofa downstairs in our main living area was long enough. After we had the loft space finished last year and moved our old living roof (oops!) room furniture up there, we just put four armchairs in the sitting area of the living room.

They were nice chairs, and when we had people in it worked out pretty well as a sitting area. But something was missing. That arrangement made the area seem more like a waiting room than a cozy corner. Almost on the spur of the moment, we decided to invest in a new sofa.

The living room avant...

Rather than driving up to Blois or over to Tours to look around in furniture store showrooms, we decided to do the 21st century thing: we surfed the web. Our first thought was Ikea. Then I thought of a French mail-order company — I guess Internet store is the new term — called La Redoute. That's where we ended up finding a sofa that looked like the one for our space, and the price was good. We were lucky to find just the kind of sofa we needed when it was marked down by 30%. Shipping was very also very reasonable at 25 euros.

...et après

La Redoute is a company that specializes in la vente à distance, which used to be called la vente par correspondance. The company was founded in the 19th century by a family in the city of Roubaix in the north of France. They named their business after the street where they first set up shop, la rue de la Redoute. Nowadays, the company is an e-vendor, with something like 700,000 visitors a day coming to its web site. It still sends out a paper catalog, but I wonder how long that will last. La Redoute operates in at least 15 European countries as well as in Japan, South Korea, Canada, and the United States.

All cleaned up and waiting for the delivery truck

One thing about getting a new piece of furniture, especially a fairly large one, is that it gives you an opportunity to do some spring cleaning. We moved two of our armchairs up to the loft, and then moved the dining room table out of the way. Walt got out the new vacuum cleaner — which we ordered from Amazon in the U.K. a couple of months ago. He gave the rugs a good going-over, and then he wiped down the tile floor around the edges of the room.

In all these pictures you can see evidence of the
nice sunny weather we've been having.

The vacuum cleaner, by the way, is an upright which I think we would call a carpet sweeper. It's the kind of vacuum cleaner we had in California. Such appliances are not easy to find in France and, from what I read, fairly uncommon all across the continent in Europe. Go figure. After eight years of using a little canister model vacuum that we bought at Darty in 2003, I finally went on the Amazon UK site and had a look around.

Here's Walt "hoovering" with the new Hoover
upright vacuum cleaner.

There I found a Hoover model, sans sac, that fit the bill. It also was very reasonably priced — just 99 109 British pounds (about 165 euros U.S. dollars) including VAT and shipping — less than we paid for the Panasonic canister vac eight years earlier. Having it to use has made cleaning so much easier, especially when it comes to vacuuming rugs to get the dog hair off. And we don't have to go driving from store to store here in the region — Tours, Blois, Romorantin, Loches — looking for the right size vacuum cleaner bags. The only explanation I can think of for the lack of such machines in France is that most houses have tile floors.

I guess one point of this post is to say again how much easier it is to live out in the country and enjoy the peace and quiet now that we have high-speed Internet access and a range of e-vendors to choose from. We've come a long way. And this is also for a post for all of you who have visited over the past few years...