Thoughts from the Shelf

With the summer now in full swing and the BBQ out more nights than not, home improvement may be a task that is put on the back burner. That said it is these summer months when some great prices can be got on furniture and other house hold products. You only have to look at the DFS sofa advertising and Kitchen prices available to back this up.

Here at The Shelf we make bring you the rundown in what furniture to look for this summer. First up sideboards:

Sideboards are often a highly under-rated piece of furniture; they are incredibly useful in many different spaces and rooms throughout the home; they fit inoffensively and neutrally with the rest of your furniture as they are not tall enough to impose upon or dominate the space in a room. In fact, most sideboards are effective in creating extra space, as they act as both a useful storage facility and a make shift coffee table and extra surface to display vases or ornaments.

Like dressers, a sideboard can be used as either an attractive piece of furniture and neat way to organise things in your home, or a cheeky space to clear the clutter away when guests announce a surprise visit! Sideboards are ideal as a piece of Indian, birch hardwood or oak furniture, as the solid wood makes them appear elegant and sophisticated. An Indian side table offers a much richer depth of colour to a room than oak furniture, which is more light and natural, but the ideal choice depends on personal preference, the existing furniture within the room and the colour and décor of the space.

Sideboards are most commonly used in dining rooms, living rooms or hallways but they would also make a useful addition to bedroom furniture or in a bathroom, where they could store towels or bathroom products.

The range of sideboards available is extensive. It is possible to choose sideboards with or without legs, sideboards with varying patterns, a sideboard of birch, Indian, mango or oak furniture, sideboards with drawers, cupboards or a combination of both depending on what exactly you intend to store, and sideboards of varying length, width and height so that the furniture will fit neatly and exactly into your home and complement the other furniture in the room.

We have recently launched a few articles that have detailed various help and advice for home improvement, namely our article titled ‘Identifying Credible Online Furniture Retailers’ and ‘Thinking about Oak Furniture’.

In the research for these articles we identified the following information that could be interesting to users reading these articles.

We have been discussing the possibility of using Oak furniture in the home, but before we move onto discussing our next topic, contemporary bedroom furniture, we should finish off with a final analysis.

Although often more expensive than other hardwoods it seems that oak furniture is a firm favourite. With alternatives including birch furniture, Ash furniture and even Mahogany still popular, the longevity of oak and ease when staining has been seen to save customers money in the long run, and thus leads the market.

When buying any hardwood furniture it is important to examine the workmanship than has gone into it. This alone is often a good indicator of the quality of a retailer. If the piece seems ramshackle or thrown together, with a sub-par finish, it obviously does not reflect well. Conversely, the sale of oak furniture, as explained above, shows the company is aware of quality, but more than anything things like well dove tailed joints and good, smooth finishes shows a company that takes pride in its work.

In short, when deciding on furniture for your home do a bit of research, and mixed with a bit of common sense you can make all the difference in getting a value-for-money, quality piece of furniture. If the price is right, The Shelf believes oak furniture is always a good way to go.

In our second home improvement post, The Shelf picks up a theme echoed in many consumer forums of late. How can you best identify a quality furniture retailer?

Narrowing this down to fit into our newly created home improvement category, we narrow this down to furniture sector, and explore how you can be safe in the knowledge you are using a credible retailer with what tend to be larger online purchases.

It is true that some people avoid shopping in sectors such as these altogether due to this uncertainty, but by identifying those online furniture retailers that are established and hold a good reputation, you can be sure that you are safe in spending larger sum of money those e commerce channels.

For most people the purchase of your house will probably be the most expensive personal outlay of your entire life. It is also commonly accepted to be one of the most stressful. However, decorating your home can also be an utter chore, and finding yourself ripped off with inferior furniture and fittings is a hassle you don’t need.

Choosing furniture for your home will no doubt take up a lot of your time whilst decorating. With the advent of the internet, the amount of people wanting to sell you furniture has increased prodigiously. The problem with too much choice though is that there will always be inferior companies that offer varying degrees of quality for your money. So, how can you attempt to sift through the chaff and find the wheat, how to spot a good furniture retailer from a bad one?

Well, like many things, a lot of picking a furniture retailer comes down to simple common sense. In many cases, if a price appears too good to be true, it often is. It is false economy to buy the cheapest when for shelling out a little more you could get a piece of furniture that endures.

Our second piece of advice is to do your research! Jumping at the first option that appears good is a recipe for disaster. Browse multiple websites, assess prices and take the opinion of families and friends. If they have furniture you consider to be well made and at a reasonable price, ask them where they got it, would they buy from there again, what was the service like? Word-of-mouth recommendations are often the most reliable indicators as to whether a retailer is genuinely worth considering or not and as such forums such a moneysavingexpert.com can be invaluable.

Observing the furniture itself is also telling. Pine furniture, while cheap, is flimsy and will not take well to painting and staining. Also, chipboard and MDF constructs will often appear cheap, but will not endure for very long. On this point, oak wood furniture is often the way to go.

In a return to the writing for the shelf I thought I would catch up with a few posts that I have been writing on other topics of late.

Split into a two part series and under a new category on the shelf titled “home improvement” we will be looking at various way of decorating your home, and furniture that can compliment existing home décor.

I the first part we will be looking at how oak has been used to build furniture for generations, and how its natural characteristics mean it still remains a popular choice for home furniture.

Oak has been used to build furniture since the middle ages and much of this furniture has endured the test of time. The wood is perfect for producing furniture because it marries strength, durability and practicality with natural beauty. It is therefore no wonder that oak furniture has always been an extremely popular material with which to make fabulous furniture.

Nowadays oak is used to make all types of furniture such as tables, bookcases, TV cabinets and computer tables. The functionality of oak furniture is staggering; it is robust, durable and sturdy. These qualities make oak furniture perfect for storage as it can easily handle heavy loads. Furthermore due to its durable nature, oak furniture will last for an extremely long time. Those skilled at working with oak can use techniques that will create incredibly strong pieces of furniture.

For example the use of dovetailed joints in drawers fuses the natural strength of the wood with an extremely high tensile strength in the joints, making incredibly solid drawers. Another benefit of having oak furniture is that it requires little work in order to keep it looking in perfect condition. Simply avoid getting it wet by mopping up any spillages and polish it about twice a year and the wood will stay looking as good as new for years on end. All of these properties mean that when buying quality items made of oak you can be assured that you will not have to replace them in a hurry.

In the second part of this series we look the aesthetics of oak, going beyond the functionality solid oak furniture can provide.