Ruby, please sip some vino for me! Alas, based on my experiences, I don't believe they have pulled it together. It has now been three weeks since our new FD CD E-lux frig was delivered and we have had nothing but problems with it. It was noisy upon startup and then quieted down for a few hours, only to come back loud enough that it could be heard at the other end of the house. Needless to say we finally turned it off and this was 12 hours after installation. We have had a repairperson out to diagnose the problem. He told us the evaporator fan had been damaged in transit. He cracked the faceplate that is in front of the evaporator fan because he was trying to bang the fan back into alignment THRU the plastic face plate. After several bangs, he finally took off the faceplate to then bang against the fan directly. The repair person said it is fixed because the noise was gone for 10 minutes and he left, telling me that he hadn't damaged the faceplate. At that point, the noise is gone and I wanted this guy out of my house. The noise came back later that night, not as frequent or loud as before but still there. We left the frig on hoping that it would go away once it had been running for 24 hours. The noise became as bad as before. We requested service again but from a different repairperson. Naturally, we got the same person back, who barely looked at it and said, oh I need to order you a new fan. That would take a week he said. We turned off the frig that night after moving everything back into our old frig. And it has now been off a week. I have left repeated messages with our salesperson to have him arrange with E'lux to take this one back and to bring us what we paid for and ordered: a brand new undamaged refrigerator. I just left him another message. Thank God, we kept our old frig which is 13 years old and makes less noise than this one does. At this point in time, I am very disappointed in Electrolux and this dealer. I would highly recommend anyone considering this product to make sure they are dealing with a company that has a good customer service reputation. We chose this retail outfit because they did according to our KD. I am really wishing we had chosen a different retail outfit to purchase this frig from. Thank you for letting me vent.

We got impulsive in the fall of 2005 when we realized that my good-paying job was not just for the year that had just ended, but was going on indefinitely. DH's dad had moved in with us in June, when his wife died. We loved having him with us, but he had to go to the basement to do laundry and down 6 steps to let our three dogs in and out, and at a very independent 86 years old, there was no getting him to NOT do those things. Plus, there was the only having one bathroom issue and the fact that we were using every square inch of that house before he moved in. So we got impulsive and went house hunting and within 8 weeks closed on a much more practical house that was 225 sq ft bigger (1450 to 1675) and had an extra half bath and a first floor laundry. Talk about minimum requirements! [We were very happy in the long run that we did not "win" the two-buyer bidding war on the slightly larger house with the finished basement, huge lot, and in-ground, heated swimming pool. It was 25% more expensive than the house we bought, and with what happened next, we needed the smaller mortgage.] With all of our stuff squashed into the old house, with peeling wallpaper I had lived with for 14 years because it was pulling off the skim coat of plaster and meant getting the room replastered, with a bathroom ceiling that needed replacement, with original oak floors that needed refinishing, and no room to put everything to do this work, we knew that we would need to move first, then do repairs and put the house on the market. We did this and got the house on the market March 1, 2006. I tried For Sale By Owner with a Realtor/broker back-up who would get a small fee and who got the house into the MLS. I offered selling Realtors a 3% commission. I had printed "Open House" signs with arrows that I posted around the neighborhood each Sunday, I had strings of colored flags like you used to see at used car lots and grand openings going from trees to the front porch and a big For Sale sign with info about the house on the front lawn. I baked cookies. Lots of lookers, no offers. I had the house assessed and he said we should UP our price! In June we hired a full-service Realtor. Over the months we lowered the price regularly. A year and a quarter later, I brought him a nurse I had met who wanted to do a rent-to-own with my house. We agreed to a price that was 84% of our original asking price. The nurse had recently gone through bankruptcy because of a husband with a drug problem and business debt that fell on her. So she needed a two-year rent-to-own. It didn't matter to us, her rent paid our mortgage! Since we had not sold the old house first, we had no down payment for the new house. Originally, we were going to do 100% financing with an 80% first mortgage and a 20% second mortgage on the new house. Then our mortgage guy came up with the idea of putting a second mortgage on the old house, instead. We would pay it off when we sold the house. It was a good idea, we thought, because it brought the mortgages on that house up to $25,000 less than it was appraised for, a good cushion, we thought in October 2005. When we got into the rent-to-own agreement, however, it was low enough that it meant bringing money to the table for the closing costs. In 2007 housing prices began to fall. In 2008, we all know that the entire economy fell. In late 2008, my DH was downsized into "early retirement" and it took him 7 months to get another job. No sooner were we comfortably back on track from that, when the nurse in our old house figured out that it was cheaper for her to buy a foreclosed house and lose her down payment on our house! That left us hanging in the winter of 2009 with an empty house in a housing market in which the empty house was now worth about $69,000 - precisely what I had paid for it in 1994 before replacing the furnace and ducts, kitchen, electrical service, water heater, concrete driveway, windows and doors, siding, trim, garage door, fence, porch, and adding central air and lots of insulation. Not to mention refinishing the wood floors throughout. Meanwhile, Dad had gone suddenly blind at the age of 91, then had prostate cancer, then skin cancer, and was bed-bound with daytime caregivers at our house. His favorite aide had left his employ and returned to her home state the summer of 2009. Her replacement was NOT comparable. Dad missed his Jenny so much, because Jen would go with the flow when it was okay and let him sleep, but force him to wake up and get food and drink in a gentle way that did not bother him, when it was necessary. She read to him and knew what he liked to hear. She read his moods well and could tell if he wanted to listen to a ball game on or wanted to rest. She kept a positive attitude even when cleaning up horrible messes from his hospital-acquired C-Dif. We could all see that he was declining without her. I heard through the grapevine that Jenny had her car and purse stolen and that neither she nor her husband had managed to get good jobs in the several months that she had been back home. After consulting with DH, I called and gave them an offer they could not refuse: a car to drive their menagerie of mammals and reptiles back to Mich and to use when they got here, shipping for their household goods, low rent in our old house. That way, we got Jenny back for Dad and had renters we knew, liked, and trusted in our house. Dad passed away several months later. Because he paid for unemployment insurance for his homecare staff, Jenny got to have free training and ended up with five health care certificates during our economic depression. She is working now, but her DH was hurt at work and is fighting for disability benefits and worker's compensation. They are still in our old house, so we have nothing to worry about as far as renters trashing our house, but they can't currently pay much. Okay, they can't pay anything, I'll admit it. It has been about three years that we have carried them. The husband has had multiple back surgeries and our Jenny is working as a nurse's aide and just not making a lot of money. But she studied hard and got her GED and all of those medical certificates, so she is trying. We don't have children of our own. I guess we got the boomerang phenomenon without having the first half where you give birth and raise the little critters, LOL! We were thinking that we might have to wait until my DH reaches the age of 59.5 and take some $$$ out of our retirement to finally unload this house. We have that second mortgage down to $25,000 from $40,000. The house is now worth about what is left of the first mortgage. It has been hard. Our new house had a expensive foundation disaster two years ago and needed a new roof last Christmas. The roof will be paid off at the end of this year, so we can be more relaxed after that. It does not help that my health has worsened and I am not working. DH is a saint! But now Discover is offering us $25,000 at 7.99%. We have to investigate it more, but if that is still being offered at the end of the year, we could use it to pay off that second mortgage and get the house on the market next spring. Incredible. We weren't sure when that could happen, but did not expect it for several years yet. In a couple, three years we might be able to have that Discover loan gone, too and be FREE! Buyer remorse. I don't know. Who knew that the market would tank so bad? I do like this larger house. My knees appreciate not having the steps. I agree with DH that it is a darned good thing that we did not get that house with the pool! We have thrown money around the past six years like it meant nothing, and I have come to the conclusion that this is partially true. As long as you can keep your heads above water, money is just a tool. It has allowed us to help our young friends have a place to live through their hard times. We will do it as long as we can. We will give them warning when we decide to do the Discover deal or not, but they will have to be on their own eventually. With luck, they will get Social Security to allow disability benefits by then. All the long timers here knew this sorry story. If anyone has read this far, I hope there was something to learn in all of this!

Ditto to what BirdGardner wrote: Sure, it looks like a showroom -- but that's pretty much what rooms look like when the movers just bring in the sofas and tables. The sofas are the building blocks to putting the room together -- a new rug (that doesn't read so neutral, maybe?) if you want, a coffee table that works nicely with the sofas, planning draperies to go with the blinds? And don't forget lighting, which will help give the room some depth. Artwork, your decorative objects. And some contrasting color somewhere. Do you have any magazine or web inspiration photos of living rooms that you love? Maybe you're just feeling nervous that you plunked down a lot of cash and trust and that you don't know how you're ever going to get "there" from "here"? It just takes time. The smell issue: I don't want to dismiss the health concerns of others, but this is frequently something that happens with mattresses, too. The mattress companies always say the smell dissipates; usually it does. But certainly raise the question with EA. Not sure that the "feel" of the sofas is going to make EA eager to take them back, at the full cost. Were these custom fabrics? (Not sure whether everything at EA is) Do you still have the fabric swatch (did you get one or take one)? Maybe there was a fabric switcheroo by mistake. Or check your paperwork and look at hidden places on the sofas to find the fabric tags (you may have to flip the sofa over) to try to match everything up. Comparing what you received with the sofa that you saw and sat on in the showroom, is it the fabric itself that doesn't feel good, or the construction of the sofa, like the density of the cushions or the depth of the seat?

Ok, three of my favorite voices around here--Palimpsest, Ideefixe and Oakleyok--have pretty well covered all the bases, but just to recap... The three biggest causes of Decorating Remorse--other than watching TV decorating shows & wishing you had done something other than what you already did, I mean--are Being in too big a hurry & buying something just to have something (rather than have nothing), Worrying about inconsequential stylistic labels & categories, and Buying brand new pieces. I did without a sofa for five years rather than buy something merely to be have something to sit on, I don't worry about what style supposedly goes with what, and I never buy anything new. Well, almost never. The most expensive thing in my house is an early 19th century sofa, for which I forked over 850 of my hard-earned dollars, and the two-months-long diet of peanut-butter sandwiches that paid for it was worth every bite. The second-most-expensive thing I ever bought was also the only thing I've ever bought new: a gigantic 3-piece arched mirror set out of a popular catalog that looked very handsome in the photo but which turned out to be a piece--well, three pieces--of junk, which I should have predicted, since, Hello!, it was in a popular catalog. All I can say is I must have been on Nyquil that day. Anyway, I seldom make mistakes, but when I do, I don't brood & beat myself up over them, so I hauled them down to the service entrance lobby of my building and in a few hours, they were gone. The sofa I'll have forever.