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Dear Miriam,
Do you have any advice on buying furniture for the first time as a married couple? An added complication is that we’re likely to stay in our current city for only a couple of years.
Signed,
Table for Two
Dear Two,
Mazel tov on starting your life together! Making these kinds of decisions in the early stages of marriage can teach you a lot about each other: your priorities, your tastes, your communication styles, your spending habits, and even your vision for what kind of home you want to build together and how you’ll spend your time in that home.
Do you envision hosting Shabbat and holiday meals? You’ll need a dining room table! Do you like to spread out to read? Get a big couch! Do you imagine guests staying with you? That will determine how you furnish that extra bedroom. So while you have decisions to make, big ticket items to purchase, and maybe even furniture to assemble, you also have each other to learn about, to listen to, and to include in all your hopes and expectations for this first home you’re putting together.
Take some very practical steps first, like making a list of what you actually need, measuring the spaces where these pieces will go, and coming up with an overall budget. Then, do a bunch of browsing. You could go to open houses of staged homes in your neighborhood, look at Pinterest, or walk through furniture stores. Once you’ve done some of both the practical and the theoretical, you can start to make your purchases.
I recommend focusing first on a small number of items you really care about, are willing to invest in, and want to have for the long term. This could be a bed, or table, or couch, or whatever, but pick up to three items that you think you’ll want to keep beyond the next two years, and find pieces that you love. Then you can design the rest of your space around those pieces, and also design the rest of your budget after those big purchases. There’s something lovely and timeless about getting something long-lasting for your first home, so even if this is a little impractical, I also think it’s worthwhile.
For everything else, go to Ikea, or Wayfair, or thrift stores, or buy nothing groups. (Though, to be clear, the pieces that you absolutely adore and want to keep forever could come from any of those places as well!) Lower investment pieces take the pressure off some of the decision-making, and they will also take the pressure off when it comes time to move and you have to decide what to do with everything you’ve accumulated. The kind of wear and tear your furniture will experience will vary widely depending on, most notably, if you have pets, or if you’re planning to have children, so those variables should also factor into your decision on what pieces you invest in now versus later versus never.
Finally, you don’t need to furnish every single part of your home right now. You can get the basics and then live with them for a couple of months. At that point, you’ll have a better feel for living together and for your new space, and the next round of purchases will likely be easier and more grounded in how you’re actually living day to day. You may realize that you need less furniture than you imagined, or that the chair you got for one part of the living room actually fits better somewhere else, so you don’t want to limit your options by filling every space immediately. You can only learn certain things by living with the furniture, and you can only learn certain other things by living with each other. Take some time to do both, and enjoy the next two years as a starting point for all the future spaces you’ll share.
Be well,
Miriam
