It wasn’t that long ago when furniture was handmade by craftsmen using real wood. It was durable but expensive. That meant only about two-percent of the population could afford anything more than a kitchen table and chair, at least that was the impression we were given by Ralph and Alice Kramden with their ultra-sparse television apartment. There were several upsides to wood furniture. Legs and handles didn’t break off when you pushed heavy pieces across a room, it lasted through several generations of a family (which could also be a bad thing depending on grandma’s taste), and you could paint it or refinish it if you needed to cover up old coffee stains and cigarette burn marks.
Most baby boomers couldn’t afford real wood furniture when starting out on their own, but unlike today there were few other options to taking handouts from various family and friends. So living room décor ran the gamut from great aunt Martha’s art deco sideboards to early American pine and varnish. The day when a young boomer couple could afford their own furniture and send grandma’s bureau to Good Will was truly a joyous occasion.
There were no such things as Walmart, Target or Ikea where one could purchase reprocessed sawdust pressed into various styles and shapes for less than a tank of gas. People simply had to live with Uncle Otto’s favorite rocker or mother’s cast off bed frame until they saved enough to buy a set of their own matching furniture. Self-assembly furniture back then was quite a bit different from today. Some bricks and boards made a nice bookshelf, a couple of saw horses and an old door could serve as a table and so on. There was almost nothing available that came as a “flat shipment” consisting of several thousand parts and pieces to be put together yourself.
Real wood furniture is still available today. If you work as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and have a BMW 735 and a six-bedroom house, there are plenty of furniture retailers to provide you with uniquely designed furniture made of African Blackwood, Australian Burl, or Bolivian Rosewood. But if your idea of an exotic vehicle is a Smartcar and your garage and living room are one and the same, this type of furniture is probably not for you. Besides, with furniture made of exotic woods it’s mandatory to have someone on retainer to dust and polish it, and that’s only if the retailer approves your home as suitable to house the furniture in the first place. No, times have changed. Leave the hardwood furniture to those who want to be burdened with future generations of dusty antiques. For the rest of us there is particle board, the future of furniture.
The new furniture is reasonably strong, somewhat lightweight, comes in all styles and colors, and looks really great in a store showroom the size of south Chicago. You have to be careful selecting this furniture however, since the showrooms are carefully designed with lighting, carpets and accessories to make them look like real rooms in multi-million-dollar homes. Just taking a couch and chair and putting them in an empty room, with a single pole lamp and a 19-inch Sony TV you’ve had since college, will definitely not have the same impact. So be prepared. If you want the whole look you might need to spend a few thousand dollars extra on accessories to properly show off that $195 couch.
There are several aspects of the new flat-shipped (unassembled) furniture to be aware of. After selecting it in a showroom, you might have to go into a huge warehouse that looks something like Warehouse 13 and find it. If you’ve not done a good job of noting the aisle and bin numbers you might spend weeks wandering around looking for your choices. This has given some retailers a secondary business selling food and overnight accommodations inside the warehouse itself, and it’s not uncommon for shoppers to just disappear for days at a time.
Once you find the location of the furniture, hopefully it’s not stacked at the top of a six-story steel shelf unit because you will have to wait for an employee with a special forklift to get it down for you. This can be a problem since many of these stores only have two employees for the entire 600-acre complex and they are kept pretty busy. If your furniture boxes are near floor level though, you are good to go as long as you can lift them onto a flatbed cart. If you are now a grandparent with bad joints or a sore back and you need a dresser, sorry. This business is for the strong and the brave only.
Last, but certainly not least, if you are lucky enough to get the furniture boxes home, and we urge you to avoid using delivery companies with names like “Suburban Distress” or “Zeke’s Same Month Delivery Service,” you will be faced with the task of assembling the furniture. This is where the truly brave are separated from the wimps. Armed with only a tiny little allen wrench (provided), you must first decipher blueprint instructions that come in 40 different languages with diagrams worthy of a NASA project manager, then convert a large stack of wood parts with random holes cut in them into something resembling a piece of furniture.
All this is done using a (provided) shopping bag of screws, bolts, nuts and miscellaneous other metal and plastic pieces that will take several days to sort out on the floor. If you don’t sort and inventory these pieces, or if a small child or pet should happen by and mess up your carefully laid out parts, you might as well forget the whole thing and just go get another box of furniture. You only get one chance to get it right and the whole affair is not for the faint of heart. We strongly recommend stocking up on Xanax, Zoloft or Prozac before starting any of this.
Once you have braved the assembly process and put your furniture together, it’s wise to check details, like the legs of a table or dresser, to make sure the whole thing is even and doesn’t wobble. Since many of the parts seem identical and may only differ by a fraction of an inch, or millimeter if you’re European, it’s easy to get a drawer front where a leg should be and so on. Quality control is the name of the game. You do not want to have guests discover that a chair is missing a load-bearing cross-support, or a coffee table leans badly enough to one end that you can’t fill glasses more than half full. That sort of thing really upsets martini drinkers, plus the particle board materials might disintegrate if they get wet and you will have to start your furniture “journey” all over again.
(Note: Furniture is a $45 billion a year industry and the largest dedicated retailer is Ikea with annual sales last year of around $15 billion. Walmart is the other major player but is not exclusive to furniture. Using the concept of do-it-yourself selection and assembly, along with flat shipment to save transportation costs, Ikea has expanded to over 300 stores in 25 countries and carries over 15,000 types of merchandise in its inventory. Good luck.)
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