My Return to India (R2I) story > R2I Chapter 4.1
A couple of months after we decided to return to India, we continue to wind down as the countdown to our moving date approached. We had either sold or given away many of our household stuff. Suja’s friend, Natalie, volunteered at a homeless shelter in town and offered to send a truck with a couple of guys to pick-up any left-over furniture, pots and pans and other unused grocery items. We scheduled the pickup for the day before we vacated our house and moved into a hotel.
The guys were very polite and professional. They walked around the house and garage and boxed the stuff they planned to carry but took one look at the leather spare sofa, just smiled, and nodded their heads. We had acquired the ‘grand’ sofa about four years earlier and this had ended up as Vijay’s favorite nook in the house. This is where he would play his games, watch TV and longue around while Sujay and I were busy around the house. Needless to say, his ‘play’ had graduated to the use of scissors that came with his craft set.
A pre-schooler with crayons, craft items and scissors on his favorite sofa. What could possibly go wrong? Exactly what you imagined. What started as a few scratches and knicks had gradually led to large gashes on the upholstery with the filling spilling out.
Labor in America is expensive and most folks simply recycle ‘old’ furniture that wears out. Re- upholstering a sofa would cost nearly half as much as a new sofa and it was simply not worth thinking about it if you plan to donate or sell it in a yard sale anyways.
Recycling old furniture is not cheap either since one can’t simply discard worn our furniture in many neighborhoods – local HOA and zoning regulations are quite strict about this. Most city councils have well defined time-tables for pickup of appliances or furniture intended for ‘large trash’ or recycling. This is scheduled twice or thrice a year and the calendar is published in advance and there was no way I was going to be able to wait for the next pickup.
I decided to google for ideas and came across a Youtube video with step-by-step instructions for disassembling a leather sofa. I was blown away by this and viewed the video a couple of times. If I could take-apart the sofa into smaller size billets and leather, I could put some with our regular dry waste and take the rest in the trunk of my car to the recycling station.
Suja and I moved the sofa to our attached-garage and armed with a few tools, began removing the cushion pins, nails and fasteners holding up the leather upholstery before removing the cushioning material and dismantling the wooden frame. While the YouTube video made the process look effortless, novice sofa-disassemblers like me had to try each step a couple of different ways before getting the hang of it. After a few of hours of this, I was left smiling with a pile of leather, cushioning material, billets of wood, pins and nails piled neatly on the floor.
Breaking down the Sofa was cathartic in a symbolic sense too. We were not just dismantling it but also dismantling the life we had built in Greensboro. Knocking out the wooden frames had another unintended consequence – helped me release some pent-up stress that had built up over the months.
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