Over the course of a couple of years, the dogs have more or less taken over the couches in the upstairs living room, and for far too long now, there’s just been no sitting in there because of all the hair. There are plenty of other places to sit in this house, and our main TV setup is in the downstairs living room, so it mostly hasn’t bothered me too much until lately, but lately it’s been freaking me right out.

I think it all goes back to one morning a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to hustle the kids out the door for school and I looked into that room and saw Tage sitting on one of the couches. I yelled at him to get off the couch right now, but in less than a minute the damage had been done. His clothes were covered–covered–in hair. He was wearing black sweatpants (the absolute worst for collecting pet hair), but he looked like he had a fur suit on. Over his loud and anguished protests–the pants have a stripe of skulls and crossbones down the legs, making them an obvious favorite, and he’d also been wearing his favorite “Blixten McQueen” shirt–I made him change into something a bit more presentable and off we went. But the image of my boy swallowed up by dog hair was etched onto my brain.

Not long after that day, I started redecorating. I moved the TV stand from the center of the room to a far corner and enlisted Olof’s help to get the worse of the two couches out of the house and into the garage (I’m harboring fantasies of having it reupholstered one day; it’s a gorgeous piece of furniture, really). Then I rearranged the remaining furniture, decided that we could do just fine with one couch instead of two–it’s really only the kids, and mostly Lydia at that, who ever watch TV in there–and started looking around online and in second-hand stores for something a little more hair-repellent that what we’d previously had (I blame the post-partum fugue I was in after Tage’s birth for the fact that I ever bought a velour sofa in the first place — clearly I was not thinking straight).

Yesterday at the Salvation Army thrift store, Olof and I found just the thing, a hunter green leather loveseat, and today we picked it up and brought it home. It’s small and relatively lightweight, so it wasn’t much trouble for the two of us to get it upstairs and in place. Getting the old couch down, on the other hand, was another matter.

The task being rather daunting, Olof used the excuse of it being a workday to announce that we’d leave the removal for another time. Having heard such things before, I knew that if I didn’t take action myself, that couch would be in my living room until next summer, at least, so I did the only thing I could do. I pushed that hairy mauve beast to the edge of the landing and heaved it over.

And it got stuck. Of course it got stuck, and stuck good. The only thing that saved me from disaster was that Olof was upstairs with me when I pushed it down the stairs, because the stairs were instantly and entirely untraversable (that our baby was sleeping downstairs, blissfully unawares, on the other side of that major stumbling block was not lost on me, but I had larger concerns at that moment, you see).

Anyway, after much pushing and pulling and cursing and chastising, we–meaning Olof–managed to get the accursed thing dislodged and down the stairs into the entryway (where it remains, lo these many hours later; I think it’s best that I bide my time some before asking Olof for help getting it outside). True, there are some gouges in the handrail (nothing a bit of sandpaper won’t fix), and a few scrapes and pockmarks on the walls (I wanted to repaint, anyway), and we did quite nearly lose a beloved wall hanging in the melée, but I’m still calling the whole affair a success. Best you don’t ask my husband what he’d call it.