Moving house comes with many challenges, and in theory teaches you a variety of skills.
But I must have missed the class on ‘Couch Physics’.
Because we have upgraded to a bigger house, we need more furniture to fill the space.
What felt like hours shuffling through furniture stores turned up a few promising leads, but none promising enough to bring another new couch into a home with two small children.
Eventually, we struck gold online: $100 share-house couch that looked both clean and sturdy. Sold.
This is where I began to apply poor logic to simple decisions.
Without much of a second thought — despite some astute observations otherwise from my wife, Grace — I decreed that the couch would indeed fit in our Holden Captiva, as long as I took the car seats out.
Technically, I was correct.
With a bit of manoeuvring, the couch was able to squeeze into the car and the boot was able to shut.
The only problem was that I needed to push the front seats forward to make it happen — leaving the couch snugly inside the car and me looking in forlornly from the outside.
Eventually I swallowed my pride, ringing a friend with an SOS.
It just so happened he was 200m away at the nearest set of lights — a stroke of luck so divine it had to be dumb.
Some well-placed strapping allowed me to get in the car and on the road, averting a potentially embarrassing crisis.
But my fortune was not yet expended.
As I pulled up at home and began fumbling with the couch to get it out of the car — knowing Grace was busy with the bedtime routine — a voice called out from the road behind me.
“Need a hand with that?”
More saviours had arrived to bail me out of my situation, helping to steer the couch inside and saving me from sitting on the couch in my driveway until the children were asleep.
Clearly, we were simply meant to have this couch — although next time I’ll be giving any piece of furniture a quick measure before committing to it.