Sofas
Buy and sell sofas in Costa Rica.
A good share of the sofas in Costa Rican living rooms never stood on a showroom floor: they were built to order in a national workshop, to the width of one particular wall, in a fabric picked from a swatch book. That is worth knowing whichever side of the sale you are on. New and pre-owned sofas both turn up here, from the juego de sala in its 3-2 and 3-1-1 forms to L-shaped salas esquineras, sofa beds and reclining sofas, and plenty of people simply call them sillones. Before you book a transport, get the seller’s measurements and hold them up against your own front door.
The sala esquinera and which way its chaise points:
is the first thing to settle on an L-shaped sofa, because most are built with the long side fixed to the left or the right, and only some have a chaise you can move across. Stand facing the sofa: the side the chaise sits on is how the listing should describe it. The juego de sala is the straight alternative, sold as a 3-2, a three-seater with a love seat, or a 3-1-1 with two single seats. It gets through doors far more easily than an L. If you only want one seat, look at armchairs. Sofa beds come as click-clacks, where the back drops flat, or fold-outs with a thin mattress inside; neither replaces a proper bed, and a guest room used every week is better served from beds.
Made-to-measure sofas from national workshops:
are the Costa Rican answer to the chain-store set. Workshops in towns like Palmares build to the size you give them, on pine or other treated wood, with high-density foam and liquid-repellent fabrics. Ask what the frame is made of, whether the seat sits on steel zigzag springs or only on elastic webbing, and what density the foam is. Springs and denser foam keep a seat level for years after webbing and soft foam have dipped. The catch with buying a made-to-measure sofa used is that it was measured for someone else’s sala, so the dimensions in the listing matter more than the photos.
Used sofas and the cost of the transportf:
a sofa loses value fast once it leaves its first house, partly because moving one means hiring a flete, a small truck and driver, and the buyer counts that into the offer. A made-to-order juego de sala runs about ₡500,000 to ₡850,000 new; a nearly new L-shaped sala of that class tends to be asked at around ₡300,000, and a plain single sofa from a moving sale often goes for ₡20,000 to ₡30,000. The ones that hold their price are recent sets with tight frames and clean fabric in a neutral colour.
Corner-lift and sofa-bed tests on a pre-owned sofa:
start with the frame, in the seller’s living room rather than from photos. Lift one front corner about ten centimetres: on a sound frame the opposite leg comes up too, and a creak or a twist means a loose joint. Pull the cushions and press the deck. Springs should be evenly spaced and clipped at both ends, and a seat that stays dented after you stand up has tired foam. Open a sofa bed all the way and close it again, and run every recliner through its full travel, asking for the cable and transformer on a powered one. Check the seams and the cloth underneath for the small dark spots bed bugs leave, and smell the cushions for damp, smoke or pets.
Width, depth and chaise side for a sofa you are selling:
put them at the top of the listing and you save a dozen messages. Add the height and whether it splits into pieces. Say whether it came from a chain store or was made to order, and if so where, because a buyer in Moravia will ask what wood and foam went into it. Be straight about pets, smoking and stains; they will see them when they arrive. Photograph it in daylight, front, ends and with the cushions off. Then describe collection day: which floor, whether there are stairs or a lift, and whether a truck can park at the door. Someone hiring a flete from Desamparados needs to know before paying for it whether the sofa came in through the front door in one piece or was assembled inside the room.