sorting the sofa

[cimorene]

In Finland if you have an old piece of furniture to get rid of which is in condition too poor to donate, your legal options are to either get it to the dump yourself (pickup services are extremely expensive) or to convert it into pieces a maximum of 60x60 cm and sort them like all other trash into recyclable metal, plastic, and glass, or burnable stuff (wood, foam, fabric).

Therefore, this isn’t the first piece of furniture we’ve ever gotten rid of this way. There was a 1980s particleboard desk, an ancient wood desk, and a hideous orange-brown 1970s synthetic tweed sofa and armchairs. All of those were easier to take apart than the enormous Asko (pricey-ish modern well-built furniture made in Finland) sectional sofa we tackled last weekend.

This sofa originally belonged to waxjism‘s brother, who has four children, and it came to us after the triplets were past sofa-destroying age, with the upholstery worn but not yet destroyed, some years ago. It didn’t fit too comfortably in our flat, but it’s the most comfortable sofa ever so we couldn’t say no. The chaise section was nearly queen mattress size and more comfortable than any of our mattresses have been. It was a noble friend and stood up to a great deal of abuse over the years - going by the date stamp I found on the inside when we took it apart, it was probably assembled in July 2001, over 17 years ago - before its upholstery finally gave up the ghost in the last year.



Once the cushions were off and the seat sections turned up on their fronts to expose the underside, we:

• scraped the little rubber feet off the bottom of the legs, exposing massive bolts that came out with a screwdriver to remove the legs


• removed nuts from two huge bolts on the inside holding the arms to the side and cut the fabric, batting and foam off the arms, exposing giant plywood and particleboard boxes


• slit the bottom edge of fabric where it was folded over to the bottom of the wooden frame and everywhere else it was stapled down and peeled it off, along with the batting and foam inside it


• unscrewed the metal crossbraces under the springs and pried the anchor strips for the springs off the wood frame with a knife


• Wax sawed through the narrower wooden pieces at key spots to take the wood bottom frames apart, because the joints were all done with so much wood glue, nails and staples that they wouldn’t pry apart as they often have in other pieces of furniture

We were left with a pile of springs and other metal bits, a bit of plastic waste, a bunch of boards with splintery ends, several garbage bags’ worth of fabric and batting, and a whole bunch of chunks of foam. After the removal of two double armloads of garbage bags and foam, Wax tidied the remainder into this stack:



… and yesterday we managed to cram all of it except a couple of foam rolls into the back of her mom’s car to drive it to the dump. (It is perfectly legal to put these in the trash! But only a few at a time, to avoid overfilling the dumpsters. Once she offered the car, we decided to wait for it instead.)

The lady at the gate complimented how smart we were to have already broken it down into pieces, because we only had to pay 2€ to leave them there instead of 12€ for a whole sofa (though it was probably easily 10€ of work on our part to take it apart - possibly more. It wouldn’t’ve fit in the car otherwise though). We put the metal in a dumpster and then we got to pull up next to a small house-sized mountain of broken bits of wood-like furniture and literally throw the pieces into it ourselves, while on the other side of it a digger continuously fed bits from the pile into a giant chipper. It was a pleasant and surprisingly wholesome place, aside from the smell.