Home furnishings are big business in the United States. In 2015 alone, furniture stores and home furnishing sales generated more than $106 billion. By 2021, estimates are that furniture and home furnishings sales will represent nearly 14% of all e-commerce retail sales in America. Furniture is also usually the third-most expensive thing that anyone will buy in their lifetime, after their home and their car. Living room furniture, bedroom furniture, and even bathroom furniture, are very important to the way we feel when we’re in our home and whether our decor brings us peace and pleasure or not. Of all the pieces of living room furniture that we own, the most important is the sofa. Here are some cool facts about this piece of living room furniture but you probably didn’t know!
- The average sofa can be expected to last between seven and 15 years. Of course, this will depend a lot on how often you eat on it, whether you let your kids jump on it, and whether the cat is using it as a scratching post.
- The sofa is what we build our living room around. If asked what piece of living room furniture most people are building their room around, you might guess the television. But a survey done in Furniture Today found that 60% of participants say their living room centerpiece is actually the sofa.
- The sofa gets used as a bed 489 times. At least that’s the average. 293 of those 489 times the sofa becomes a bed will be because of a domestic dispute that drives one spouse out of the master bedroom.
- Your sofa, on average will host 782 guests. This is not counting guests that sleep on it, but just guests that sit on it. Pity your poor sofa. That’s an awful lot of rear ends to hold up.
- No other indoor furniture gets to watch TV as much. Your sofa will watch approximately 782 movies during the course of its life with you. If only your sofa could get a job as a movie critic and help out with expenses.
- We spend four hours a day on our sofas. That’s the average, and that’s a lot of time given how much we tend to whine about not getting enough sleep! A lot of the time that we’re spending on our sofas we’re eating, too: about 13 meals every month.
- Our word for the sofa is more than 4,000 years old. The word that we use to speak of this piece of living room furniture is one of the oldest words still in regular use in human language. It dates back to 2000BC and Egypt and comes from the Arabic word suffah meaning “bench.”
- Children jump on sofas a lot. The average sofa will endure children jumping up and down on it 587 times before it finally gives up.
- Deposit your change at the Bank of Sofa. Sofa owners will typically find change or other money inside their sofa three times every month. Each time they find some, it averages about $.60. That’s a dollar and $.08 in an average month, and over the course of the sofa’s entire lifetime it will hold a total of about $176.04. Speaking of valuable things that you find the sofa, the average child loses four toys every month down the back of the sofa, as well as three socks.
The average consumer in the United States is willing to spend approximately $2,200 to redecorate the living room. Whether you’re headed to a boutique furniture shop or need to save money and get the cheapest items you can find, make sure that you do invest when it comes to your sofa. It’s the most important piece of living room furniture that you own.
