Places to live in Brooklyn?

[Acrossthesea]

I've got a thread here from last year saying that my DH was offered a transfer to the NYC office with his work. It took a while but we are almost done negotiating the contract & package. It's not as generous as it used to be, they won't now pay for brokers fees but we are overall happy with it.

We've decided against living in Manhattan, our friends think I'll hate it. I've never been to NY so have no idea. We don't have time for a before trip. We've started looking at Brooklyn, maybe Williamsburg, but any other areas we should look at, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights? DH will work in Bryant Park. We are looking for a Clapham feel to an area, no DCs but we are planning for it in the next years.

I spoke too soon! We applied and lost 2 apartments since my update. It's really the Wild West trying to rent somewhere, the whole being foreigner hasn't helped. But I think fingers crossed we have found somewhere suitable that will go through.

But does anyone have any recommendations for comfortable and big sofa beds? We are going to need one in the apartment I think we are getting.

Sofas at IKEA are horrible. American leather have the best sleeper sofa. This company also makes sofas for crate and barrel, west elm etc.

If I were you I'd go to raymor and Flanagan. Ask them what is available for delivery in the next week. It took a month for ours to arrive.

Is the sofa bed for occasional guests or for everyday use? Crate and Barrel do great quality sofa beds but are seriously pricey. Raymour and Flanigan are nice quality at more reasonable prices and can have fast delivery. They usually have some kind of 15% off offer so of they don't, ask if a sale is coming up and if you can get the discount anyway.

You'll need to check with your building management to book an elevator for large deliveries like a sofa in advance.

Just to warn you, American leather sofa beds are not the best for sitting on but we made ours much more comfortable with big cushions from pier 1 and IKEA.

Great places to start looking. It would be for the not-so-occasional guests. We want something actually comfortable to sleep on since I'll be sleeping in it every time my parents or in laws come visit for 2 weeks.

Would these be places where we could also buy beds? We didn't bring ours.

IKEA do good beds. They are somewhat affordable. The other good place to look is Macy's over Memorial Day weekend.

For proper beds, you can also try Charles Rogers (they have a Manhattan showroom) or Sleepys that do run of the mill beds and bases. Ikea ones are good but annoyingly slightly different in size to standard US beds

One thing worth looking in to is how to get said beds and sofa beds into your apartment. We once got our sofa bed wedged 8foot high up in the hall at move in, and had to send our new bed back as they couldn't get it round the stairs to our walk up flat!

A good resource for sofas that won't move easily are these guys - we used them twice to take apart our sofas (including the sofa bed that got stuck...) and out together the other end nycouchdoctor.com

We ended up with mainly Ikea furniture basically as it was flat pack and so it could easily be moved in and out!