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It’s the end of July in Ames and you know what that means — curb shopping! This time-honored practice has furnished many a dorm room and rental house. From about July 25th through August 2nd, one need only drive around a few streets with rental properties to find dozens of chairs and couches as well as a few dressers, end tables, bookcases and other miscellany. But couches always seem to be the hot item.

Now that we are home owners and can paint our walls fun colors, we wanted to move up from curb and free furniture to the next step up on the furniture food chain to thrift store furniture. We made a trip down to the Salvation Army in Des Moines and picked up a sweet couch and chair (as well as an office chair) for only $52 — it normally would have been twice as much, but we discovered that every Wednesday is 50% off day!

As most college students and young adults know, curb furniture is the bottom of the couch food chain. Couches start off their lives being bought from an expensive furniture store. Only “real adults” buy furniture there, and I am sure you have to be at least 30 to qualify. After a couch has outlived its usefulness in the living room of a home, it might move to a basement or less-used room of the house. This is the second step in the couch food chain. After another new couch enters the home, a new owner will be found for that basement couch. If it is still nice, it joins the third level of the food chain — a used furniture store or the classified ad section of the local newspaper. If it is not in good condition (or it is a couch originally purchased at the third level) it will go straight to level four — the thrift store or garage sale. After a level four couch has out-lived it’s usefulness, it decends to level five — the curb furniture. At level five there are also couches that are so poor that one can’t sell them and you give them away to someone directly, instead of anonymously at the curb. At level five, couches continuily recycle, going out to the curb and into dorm rooms, apartments, and rental houses, and then back out on the curb as students and young people chose not to move them when leases are up or the school year is over.

After a couch is finally no longer useful at level five, it is out of the food chain, and destinied for the dump…or in the case of Ames, the trash-burning facility at the power plant.

When we brought home the “new” level-four couch from the Des Moines Salvation Army, Tony asked what we would do with the old one it was replacing. It was ugly enough (and heavy enough) that we didn’t want to put it in the basement. I said, “Put it out on the curb of course!”

It was gone within less than 12 hours.

Though we now own a level-four couch, we may still be on the hunt for some level five finds. So be sure to tell us if you see anything that fits our color scheme!