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Home and Garden Furniture Buying Guide
Your home is where you spend most of your free time, pursue your personal interests, raise your family, and entertain your friends. It reflects your taste and your way of life. To achieve the beauty and comfort you want, you will make a substantial outlay for furniture and furnishings.
Every bit of expert advice ever given says to buy quality furniture. That means good material and sound construction over fad-dishness in design and color. It usually means higher price, but although you pay more, you will get longer and more satisfying service.
Even for young couples starting out, the experts advise investment in quality. Getting pieces slowly even one at a time may seem a bit dreary and self-sacrificing, but the ultimate pleasures are the greater.
Another thing to consider, especially for the first-time home furnishers, is that tastes are bound to change from time to time. If your basic pieces are well-built, and have simple, clean lines, you can accommodate your taste changes by varying the accessories.
You can also go along with the latest way-out fashion in color, fabric, and design of accessories if the main big pieces have the timelessness of good taste and quality. Would you like to buy a $1500 sofa made by a nationally known manufacturer for about 30 per cent off? You can do it if you mark time, keep an eye open for the ads, and then act quickly when you spot a warehouse sale of a leading furniture or department store.
Keep in mind that the warehouse may be distant and hard to find. But, once there, you can often get furniture of a better quality than you could normally afford. Don't expect a wide choice of style, fabric, color, and wood at a warehouse sale.
The pieces offered are often one-of-a-kind, so you will have to settle strictly for what's there. Of course, if savings on a chair or sofa are great enough, you can consider reupholstering or slip covering to get the fabric and color you want.
There might also be some nicks or dents in the wood, but generally the condition of furniture in warehouse sales is good. To reupholster the furniture you bought in such a sale, your best bet is to watch for custom upholstery sales. Many department stores run upholstery sales or specials about twice a year.
The purpose of these sales is to make room for new fabrics, patterns, and colors. The range of materials on sale may be slightly limited, but you will save from 20 to 30 per cent on what you do find.
More and more smart buyers are turning to secondhand furniture and household equipment as the way to keep costs down. They have found that secondhand is far from second best. For example, imagine an elderly childless couple who have had an elegant home for many years.
They decide to move into a small apartment, and put an ad in the paper to get rid of the bulk of their household treasures. This could be a treasure trove for you, because you are likely to get high quality at bargain prices.
In our generally mobile society, people frequently sell off all their furnishings, rather than move them from place to place. If you watch the newspaper classified ads, you can often find excellent used furniture from diplomats, armed services personnel, or others on the move.
The main drawback is that you must arrange for pickup and delivery yourself. Also you get no guarantees, which can be risky with appliances, but careful inspection can go a long way toward reducing risk and the savings are usually enough to make taking a chance worth it.
There is one golden rule for the specialist in secondhand shopping: go for the best you can find. Products that were cheap and shoddy to begin with only get worse with use. Top quality products can withstand a great deal of wear, and often get a mellowness that adds to their charm.
Look for good graining in the wood and veneer and examine the unexposed part of the wood, too, to make sure there are no hidden defects. Give chairs, benches, and sofas a firm shakes to see if legs fit tightly. If the furniture is jointed, get your husband to make sure the joints are of the mortise and tenon type or, even better, dowelled.
Furniture with butt joints that is, with the two pieces of wood brought flush together and screwed or glued is not worth the price, new or used. A good time to make a start in buying secondhand is when you furnish a spare room, change from nursery to children's bedroom, or equip the den with a refrigerator of its own.
The young couple just starting out may also want to carefully consider used furnishings. Doing so would enable them to save up to buy better things when their tastes are more set, and their lives more settled. Another money-saving device is to buy unfinished furniture.
Chests of drawers, bookshelves, and desks are often good buys, and it can be fun to finish them in the exact color or wood grain you want.
Some of the unfinished furniture today is not only reasonable in price, but also of good design and construction waiting only for your imagination and skill to transform it into an attractive and useful part of your life.
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