Home Reserve Furniture

I recently bought a house and I am faced with the daunting task of filling it up with furniture so it doesn’t look like a collection of empty rooms. My girlfriend and I did a little furniture shopping when she was in the area and I was practically knocked unconscious at the prices. Even IKEA, the cheapest of the cheap, sells their cheapest decent sofa at $250 and I know, based on first-hand experience, that after a year or two the fabric will wear away and begin tearing. That’s why an email from Byron of HomeReserve.com was so fortuitous.

Disclaimer: HomeReserve gave me one of their chairs to try out. Byron never asked for me to write a review and he didn’t give me the chair expecting a review of any kind posted on my blog.

How do you buy furniture online?
Basically you pick a furniture piece, you pick a fabric, and they UPS it to you. You have a 30-day trial period where you can swap out fabrics anytime you want and there’s a five year warranty on the product, something IKEA doesn’t have (at least not when I looked on their website).

I requested 3 fabric samples (well, my girlfriend picked them out) which they sent to me immediately (UPS 2nd Day Air). The three I went with were Ranger Twill material and in the colors of parchment (tan), some blue and dark green; we went with the parchment. I sent along my request on a Monday and UPS notified me of its shipment on a Wednesday.

Putting it all together:
The chair comes in two boxes weighing a combined weight of around 70 lbs (47 and 30 lbs) and took about two days to ship. Putting the whole thing together was pretty easy. There are little plastic T-brackets that fit snugly into the wood frame which are used to screw into and hold the pieces together. The chair had 18 screws and I put the whole thing together in about half an hour with a regular screwdriver (they have installation videos).

Comfortable & Soft:
The chairs are really comfortable, almost a little too puffy, but I think that’s a matter of personal preference and, with age, the puffiness will be softened (which makes sense and is something they claim on the site). The seat and armrests are made of foam but the back pad is actually a pillowy material. So far everyone who has sat in the chair has said you couldn’t tell, by either eyeballing it or sitting in it, that the chair was under $200 and that I had to put it together.

Also, I don’t know about the “built in storage” because the chair is so small, but you can probably get away with putting a few little boxes underneath. It’s probably more feasible with the coach.

Finally, one thing that they do is put negative (and positive) comments on their site, which is something you don’t see very often. Also, if you’re interested about credibility, they’ve been featured in a bunch of magazines.