So most of you know that we arrived here with very little furniture. A television stand, an antique/make-shift coffee table, a butcher block, and a couple of small hand-me-down end tables were pretty much the only furniture items we owned worth shipping over here. Besides that, we had at least 2,000 pounds of dog food and the entire toiletry and canned good sections of the local Houston Heights Kroger that took up most of the space in our crate. So with that said, furniture shopping became a high priority for once once we moved into the house, and all we had to sit on were mounds of Taste of the Wild dog food. So rather than pile and position these bags into an entire living room set, we set out on a mission to find furniture. Real furniture. Rumor has it that you can find good quality furniture over here for relatively inexpensive prices. You just have to know where to look. Well after looking in all of the WRONG places for quite some time and growing increasingly desperate, we decided to hit up the Convention Center for the Furniture Expo that happened to be in town at the time. It was mainly designed for furniture manufacturers to showcase their products to furniture retailers throughout Asia, but with enough begging and pleading, sometimes these manufacturers can be talked into making products directly for normal, needy people just like us! We met the woman representing the Chesterfield Collection and got an invitation to their manufacturing plant out of the deal (after some phone calls, emails, and more begging and pleading of course). Will and I made an appointment to meet the man in charge of the whole operation and drove out to the plant one morning to see how and where the Chesterfield creation is born....and what a thing of beauty it is! We pulled up on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere (actually, it was very much in the middle of somewhere....that somewhere just so happened to be rows of old Chinese villages now mostly occupied by stray dogs), and once the cloud of dust cleared from our drive in, we finally saw this magical little place where all of the furniture elves were hard at work, crafting couch after couch by hand in this furniture fairyland called Chesterfield. We sat side by side with the man in charge, and he talked us through the entire process. All we had to do was tell him how many pieces we wanted, and in what size, styles, and colors, and those little elves I just mentioned started hand-making them for us, exactly to our specifications!! Amazing. In just a little over 3 weeks we had a whole new living room set custom-made, plus an extra leather loveseat for the tv room thrown in just for grins. Granted, our house looks a bit like a Chesterfield showroom now, we couldn't be more pleased with our purchases! Our furniture family is finally starting to take shape, and we are so excited to have met the wonderful people of Chesterfield to help make our sofa, chair, ,and ottoman dreams come true!
Will enjoying a very rare chance to kick his heels up and relax in his new chair after work!
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