The creation of the world's worst couch.
Back in the 1970s my grandparents decided they needed a couch that fit the two of them and their three sons all at the same time. My grandpa has always been the farm kind of handy and my grandma has always been an environmentalist. They drew up a design for the perfect couch that could fit five that would be made with reclaimed wood and organic nontoxic latex foam cushions.
Since it was the 1970s the reclaimed wood came from a fallen tree from their yard and the latex foam had to be mail ordered from South America along with the glue it needed. The fallen tree was hard rock maple, a ridiculously strong and dense wood. It's what bowling lanes are made with. Literally wood you can hurl a bowling ball at and it won't make a dent. It's also incredibly heavy.
My grandpa is great at building things but he's not a furniture designer so the couch was really a church pew. An incredibly overbuilt, heavily reinforced church pew so their perfect couch could last forever. He had sort of just eyeballed the angle for the back rest so it was nearly 90 degrees and absolutely unbearable to sit on. It was so heavy that it took all five of them to get it in the house even with my dad and his brothers all being teenagers at this point. The organic latex foam was so thin it just felt like sitting on bare wood because it was too expensive to buy more than a small amount. It also smelled like latex for months and they never used the other 95% of the special glue.
So they gave up on the perfect couch. Not before trying to use the bulletproof church pew for weeks but they did eventually go back to the combination of old chairs and couches they had before. Actually getting rid of it or buying something new was out of the question based on who they both are as people. They also got divorced and never designed anything together again, which was for the best.
When my dad went to college a year or two later, the couch was the only piece of furniture he was allowed to take with him because no one ever used it. He managed to get it to the house he would be living in, but no one was willing to help him move it again so it just stayed there. It's probably around somewhere still, that thing was built to withstand a fucking atomic bomb.