Three sofas on the shortlist, one living room, and a return policy that charges 150 dollars for pickup. The usual next step is a Saturday of showrooms followed by an educated guess, and the guess is what the 150 dollars is for. Instead the room went into SketchUp Free on Saturday morning, all three sofas went into the room on Sunday, and by Sunday lunch one of them was a clear winner, one was out, and the showroom trip had shrunk to a single visit with a list. About four hours of work and no software cost, and the measurements are where every decision came from, so they are all here.
Saturday morning, twenty minutes with a tape
The room is 14 by 12 feet with a 9 foot ceiling, and those turned out to be the least useful numbers of the morning. The useful ones were the door, 36 inches wide and opening into the room, the two window sills at 30 inches, three outlets and one cable point, a floor vent near the window, and a bookcase that is staying put at 36 by 12 by 72 inches. All of it went on one sheet of paper, and every item on that sheet later killed either a sofa or a position for one.
Saturday, the room on screen
SketchUp Free runs in a browser with a free account and nothing to install, and the room took twenty-four minutes. A rectangle typed in as 14 by 12 feet and pulled up 9 feet gives the walls, and cutting the door and the two windows into them is the slowest part at ten minutes for someone who has not done it before. Guide lines laid with the Tape Measure at the outlets and the cable point mark the things that cannot move, three tags called Walls, Existing and Test keep the trial pieces separate from the permanent ones, and a plan scene saved looking straight down is the view everything gets judged in later.
Saturday afternoon, the furniture
Two of the three sofa makers had a 3D download on the product page, which is worth checking before anything else, since a download and an import is two minutes’ work. The third sofa had no file and was drawn as a plain box at its listed size of 84 by 38 by 34 inches, which is enough for a fit test even if it looks like a parcel in the renders. The coffee table came from 3D Warehouse, the TV stand is a box, and the rugs are rectangles drawn on the floor.
The armchair already in the room needed a different route, since nobody publishes a model of a chair bought in 2019. It was photographed against the wall from seat height, the photo was converted to a 3D model, and the model was scaled to the chair’s real 32 inch width, eight minutes in all. The shelf and the lamp came from a library of free SketchUp furniture models as .skp files and were scaled the same way, which once the habit is there is a minute’s work with the Tape Measure: two points across the width, the real width typed in, a yes to SketchUp’s question about resizing the whole model. Forty minutes for everything, and the room on screen had the same bookcase, the same armchair and the same badly placed vent as the real one.
Sunday, the same seven checks on every sofa
Each sofa went in on the Test tag against the long wall with the rug and the coffee table already in place, and each one faced the same seven questions in the same order, which is the only way the comparison stays honest when one of the sofas is the one everybody secretly wants. Does the door still swing fully. Is there 30 inches to walk behind. Is the coffee table 14 to 18 inches from the seat edge. Is the TV at least 8 feet from the seat for a 65 inch screen. Do the front legs land on the rug. Does the arm clear the window sill by 2 inches. And is the seat an inch or so higher than the 17 inch coffee table.
Sofa A, the 84 inch, passed all seven without drama, with 34 inches behind it, the table 16 inches out, the TV 10 feet away, all four legs on the 8 by 10 rug, 4 inches of sill clearance and an 18 inch seat sitting an inch above the table. Sofa B, the 92 inch, was the one everybody had liked in the photographs, and it blocked the door swing, left 22 inches behind it and sat with its arm hard against the sill, three failures out of seven, out by ten in the morning. Sofa C, the 78 inch, passed everything and left a generous 40 inches behind it, but only its front legs reached the rug and in the plan view it looked like a sofa that had wandered in from a smaller room, which made it a keeper only if A sold out.
Sofa A was then tried in two other positions, which took five minutes and settled the question for good. Floating 24 inches off the wall it left only 10 inches behind it, and under the window it cut the coffee table gap to 12 inches, so against the long wall it stayed.
The colour argument, settled by the window
With the shape decided, the three fabric swatches went onto the sofa with the Paint Bucket, one per scene, and the shadows were switched on with the clock set to four in the afternoon because that is the hour this room actually gets used. Each scene was exported as an image and the three were lined up side by side. The grey that had looked best on the swatch card had gone faintly green under the afternoon window light, and the oatmeal had not, and an argument that had run for two weeks was over in about twelve minutes.
This is not a render and nobody should mistake it for one. SketchUp Free’s shadows are plain and the model has no idea how a fabric feels. What it will tell you is how a colour sits next to a particular window at four o’clock, which is more than a swatch card under shop lighting has ever told anyone.
The showroom, once, with a list
One visit instead of three, carrying a list of what the model cannot measure. Width arm to arm, since that is what the door and the walkway care about; depth back to front, for the coffee table gap; seat height from the floor to the cushion top, against the table; seat depth, for comfort; leg height, for the vacuum cleaner and the rug; and the carton size, which the salesperson has to look up and which decides whether the thing fits through the front door at all.
The questions worth asking in the showroom are the ones no model can answer, and they are also the ones salespeople least enjoy.
| Ask about | A good answer |
| Frame | Hardwood, not plywood |
| Springs | Sinuous or hand-tied |
| Cushion fill | High-resilience foam, or foam wrapped in fibre |
| Fabric rub count | 15,000 double rubs or more for daily use |
| Covers and legs | Both removable |
| Lead time | In writing |
The delivery check that caught sofa B a second time
Sofa B was already out, but for the record its boxed size, 40 inches deep and 36 high standing on its end, would also have failed at the stair landing, which is 38 inches wide. Sofa A’s carton clears the 36 inch front door on its end, the 42 inch hallway turn and the landing. Measuring the route before ordering is worth five minutes, because the delivery crew will otherwise measure it for you on the day, with the van outside and the meter running.
The weekend in numbers
Two and a half hours on Saturday and an hour and a half on Sunday, two showroom visits saved, and one return avoided, which at 150 dollars for pickup plus the restocking fee pays for a great many Saturdays. The model of the room stays on the laptop, so when the floor lamp question comes up in March the room is already measured and built and the check takes five minutes instead of a weekend.