the couch fiasco

I feel like I’m stuck in a bad episode of The Red Green Show. As I write this, Matt is out in the garage trying to turn our couch into a loveseat. I know how ridiculous this sounds. I spent three weeks trying to convince him to leave the poor thing alone, but he is convinced of his eventual triumph.
This fiasco started when we moved in. He was determined to create a basement den for himself, and our old couch was the focal point of his design. Unfortunately, our house was built in 1940 and features small hallways and narrow doorways. After our families finished helping us move and left for home, Matt and I tried to get the couch down the stairs and into his dream male getaway.
We spent three hours moving it a little bit this way and a little bit that way, but it would not budge. At one point, we had it wedged in the hallway next to the basement door, trapping us both in the kitchen. With our keys out of reach, we couldn’t go out the back door and walk around to the front; instead, Matt had to climb atop a small shelf and gracefully squeeze himself through a small opening to get to the other side. After this incident, I asked him a key question: “Didn’t you measure the couch and doorway first?”
“Well, yeah,” he said without looking at me.
“And how big are they?”
He kept looking at the ground. “The couch is 33”, and the door is 29”.
“Are you kidding?”
We had just spent an entire afternoon trying to force a couch into a door that is 4” too small; the thing that got me is that he knew it was too small before we even started. He finally conceded that his grand plan was not to be and moped the rest of the weekend. In fact, he moped until tonight when he drew a messy line of marker on the couch and started to slash at it with his utility knife.
"So, do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
"I’ll figure it out. Just wait. I’ll figure it out, and it’s going to be awesome.”
I looked around our garage. He had three tools: a utility knife, wire snips, and a handsaw. This should be interesting.