More Shopping

We've really got things down pat when it comes to torturing our children. Saturday afternoon and evening we thrilled them with the news that we were going furniture looking! You can imagine how excited they were to hear this. They might have preferred yet another trip to Home Depot or Lowe's before hearing these dreaded words.

So, off we went to Schneiderman's to look at sectionals. There is a fantastic salesman there - Ron (the bald one, as he put it, since there are two of them) and he spent so much time with us and answered all our questions. He took us all around the store - a couple times, much to the kids "delight" - and answered all our questions. Not pushy, gave his opinion only when he thought we were wavering, and just was an all around good salesman that we were both super impressed with. We picked out a couch that we really really liked and did everything but sign the dotted line. We really are just looking and pricing at this point.

Then it was off to dinner. Since we were in Lakeville we decided to head to the Cracker Barrel. There is a good chance we were the youngest in the restaurant by about 40 years - Maddie and Jake the youngest by 60 years. It wasn't terrible until we left and the kids looked across the street to see HOM furniture and knew where we were headed next.

There we met with possibly the dullest salesman. He wasn't incompetent when it came to the furniture knowledge, but he wasn't far from it. To his credit, he did walk around with us, but the expertise and general interest in our sales just wasn't there beyond "what's my commission gonna be." He just wasn't Ron. His favorite reply to us was "I hear ya..." which he said quite often and we'll probably repeat when we need a good laugh. He took us to the most expensive furniture (which happened to be the only one we liked, of course) and wrote up the amounts. Thank goodness it turned out to be way more than Ron's quote because I wasn't going to be able to face that guy and tell him we had to go somewhere else for a better deal. I literally cheered in the car on the way home when I compared the quotes and realized we could skip the HOM stuff.

Maddie and Jake made the best of it at HOM though. I'm sure the people walking out thought we were some dumb tourists standing in the entryway to take this picture (which the kids actually requested I take...)

As a "gift" for going along and really being fairly well behaved in these stores for a couple hours we got them some dry-erase markers to use in their secret hideout. The jury is still out on whether this specially painted wall was worth it. It doesn't clean up so great so far. We'll see. But, it covered us for having killed their Saturday afternoon.