29th October, 2006
Hide-a-Bed Hell
by
When I left P.G. in 1983, I took the hide-a-bed with me. This thing weighed about two thousand pounds, but I loved it. It was then moved up and down a flight of stairs to my apartment on Balsam Street in Vancouver. Next it was moved into our first house in Burnaby. Finally it was moved into the basement of our house here in Kelowna.
Once the kids were regular users of it, it was game-over for the hide-a-bed. Several years ago it ended up in the dumpster, so I went out and got another one as I found them rather convenient.
When the new hide-a-bed sofa was delivered, we discovered that the entrance to the basement living room was too small. I wanted that couch in that room, so started to phone family, friends and neighbours. Finally, the neighbour two doors over answered, and I asked him to please come over asap for an emergency.
He arrived within moments, and was perplexed at the situation before him. Being a carpenter, he decided that chain-sawing out a section of the wall would be the only solution. He proceeded to cut out a large enough opening, and the couch was placed into the living room. The cut wall remained like that until the reno this summer.
This ugly green hide-a-bed was quite cheap, so it didn’t take the kids more than a few months to make mincemeat out of it. To use it as a bed one had to put the coffee table under the mattress at one end. Nicky received a knife from his favourite uncle, my brother, one Christmas, which he referred to as his “shiv.” I guess one evening he must’ve grown bored as on one of my rare trips into the basement living room I noticed several large gashes in the couch.
Needless to say, when we were doing the reno this summer, this couch ended up in the dumpster with a lot of other ratty things. Denis had had to chain-saw it in half in order to remove it from the basement, and so we vowed never to own one of these things again.
When we renovated the basement, we removed one bedroom, and hence there’s nowhere for anyone outside of Nicky to sleep down there. With the recent surprise announcement of Luke’s return to the house, the only solution was yet another hide-a-bed. I’ve picked what is supposedly a sturdy one, with what the salesman referred to as “indestructible” fabric, but he has no idea what this piece of furniture is up against. I’m just praying the opening to the basement living room is big enough ——