Recommendations Needed: In need of 2 pieces of furniture.

1. Crib : Expecting a baby soon (early december). Want recommendations on Crib. Didn't really like the highly marketed mainstream brands as they looked very flimsy in terms of construction. What to look for when buying cribs? Any trusted brands.

2. Small Reclining leather sofa : We are moving from our suburbs home to a major city downtown where me and my wife work for a year. Our current sofa is massive and will not fit almost any high rise. So, planning to leave it in our current home. So in need of a Small reclining leather sofa which we can use for a year and then take it with us when we move back to the suburbs. Please recommend.

I have never come across a small reclining sofa. I suggest you get a small stationary one then supplement with an ottoman.

For the crib, we were happy with our Pottery Barn Kendall crib. That is probably what you meant about 'highly marketed', but it worked well for us and was plenty strong and a good price. It is pretty popular and has been made for years, if there was a reliability problem it would be known. I re-assembled it multiple times from moving or switching our daughter's room and from moving the mattress height down and it stayed sturdy. Our daughter was a rocker too and would soothe herself by rocking against the bars in one corner quite hard. I would buy it again. After we were done with it, it was still in great condition and we sold it on to someone else and they used it for their new baby as well for another couple of years.

Two things I would do over:

1. Put teethguards on the end rails from the start. The crib came with a cover for the side rails, but for our daughter when she started teething and was tall enough to reach, she would gum on the end rails and we had to put some covers on them.

2. Skip buying the kit that converts it to a toddler bed. By the time they are big enough to need it, just get them a regular bed. When she was outgrowing her crib we set it up with the conversion kit but it doesn't actually give any more space so she was still just outgrowing it and we moved her into a twin bed within a week. It was a waste of money. Our kid never climbed out of her crib though, so maybe for other people if your kid is a climber and you need to get them out of the crib when they are still smaller it could be useful. If you do go with the Kendall crib, they have made it for years and I doubt they would discontinue it so you could probably skip buying the kit at the start and just purchase down the road if you do decide to get it.

Also a quick tip: put two sets of sheets and water proof covers on (mattress -> cover -> sheet -> cover -> sheet). This way if there is an accident you can just pull off the top one and then put them right back to sleep on the second layer, rather than having to fiddle with remaking the crib with a new set of sheets in the middle of the night.

Thank you so much for recommending the crib. Additionally CR and Wirecutter also recommended it. We added the crib to our registry.

Thanks for the tips about tooth guard and sheets. Very insightful.

This is the thing I love about this forum, everyone is so genuine and really nice people.

Thank you Duane for bringing all nice people together.