Home Furniture Guide

Relocating a home or office requires a lot of furniture to be moved. Moving some furniture to the new location is often cheaper than buying new furniture. Besides, people will want to move personal effects, antiques and other items that are irreplaceable.

Furniture movers move furniture in a professional way. Hiring them makes moving easy and saves precious furniture from damage. Having had the experience of moving jobs they are well aware of packing, loading and unpacking procedures. Depending on the distance and items to be transported they also suggest the best means of transport. Sometimes most carriers have extra space. If furniture is listed on an online market place then many carriers actually post attractive bids.

These movers are more than mere transporters. They help in the entire relocation process. The furniture is properly packed and insured, irrespective of whether the move is local or long distance. Professionals carry out the entire job. Some aspects of the furniture moving process are difficult. Moving antiques and pianos require specialists for the job. During the move they keep track of the shipment.

Packing is a crucial point for a successful move. One must be aware that accidents can happen. Special packing material is used for delicate items, to minimize damage in case of an accident. Specially made crates are used extremely delicate items.

Moving furniture through small doors also requires the services of an expert. Hand trucks and trolleys are useful for moving the furniture. Movers place special movers or wheels under some heavy furniture pieces. It becomes easier to move and load them then.

The ways and means employed by professional movers are time tested and safe. Furniture moving is best left to them to handle.

Share This

Not too long ago, the vast majority of outdoor furniture was all made of teak. Teak has proved to be an ideal lumber species for outdoor furniture, due to its high durability, ease of working with machine tools, its low coefficient of radial and tangential expansion (which reduces potential problems in twisting, or swelling when wet), it’s attractive colour and good working properties. But such widespread use of teak, including for marine decking, has come at a considerable environmental cost. The once great forests of South East Asia have been decimated to the extent that legally logged teak is now only available in very limited quantities, which is reflected in its high price. But unfortunately, illegal logging is still rampant and in many areas of South East Asia, ensuring its continuing supply to the furniture trade.

Plantations of teak have now been established in a number of countries including Costa Rica for example (presumably planted in most cases where the great forests once existed). But this plantation teak is harvested at a much younger age that has traditionally been the case, so caution should be taken in assuming that the properties of such younger lumber (including durability) will be the same as old growth teak.

Many responsible furniture manufacturers will now only used teak which has been certified by such independent bodies as the Forest Stewardship Council. If sustainability of forests and sound forestry practices are an important consideration in your choice of furniture, then look for the FSC logo or ask your retailer to provide documentation to show from where the lumber was sourced. Note however that even if the tag accompanying any wood furniture claims that the wood is sourced from sustainable forests, unfortunately there is no firm guarantee that this is true. You may be able to make some verification by checking the FSC website, which indicates which companies and even manufacturers have been given official accreditation by the FSC.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of different lumber species used in outdoor furniture as more manufacturing plants are set up in places such as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, in particular. Unfortunately, a lot of furniture is now produced with price as the overriding consideration, with scant consideration being given to the durability or in service performance of the furniture. And all too often these days the name of the actual wood species in not even displayed - except perhaps a bland statement like “manufactured from durable hardwood species”. And of course a lot of lumber is transported to furniture makers located far from the original source of the lumber, making it even harder to track the actual supply country or region.

Thus there is often no guarantee that the furniture, which may look magnificent in a covered showroom, will survive the rigours of outdoor use, year after year, fully exposed to the elements. Apart from the failure to state what timber species has been used, sometimes a wood species is quoted which is virtually unknown outside its country of origin and data on its durability or other properties is either nonexistent or extremely difficult to locate.

Although we have only referred above to the durability factor, this not the only property you should be concerned with. Many species of lumber, although very durable, are also prone to twisting, warping and cracking under adverse climatic conditions, particularly where thin wood section are concerned. Again teak has proved to be a very stable species in this regard but other species are not necessarily so stable.

Whilst the lower costs and attractive colour of some outdoor furniture can certainly be appealing, we strongly suggest you should always ask your retailer to provide the name of the lumber species used and from which country it was sourced. If this species is not familiar to you, no other data is provided, and your independent research fails to locate data on such species, you should think carefully before making your purchase.. Good quality outdoor furniture should give many, many years of service and its higher initial cost will inevitably be repaid in terms of a longer service life and a much higher quality product.

Malcolm Kay is the CEO of Intex Pacific Pty. Ltd. an international supplier of landscape materials including modular decking tiles. For more information see http://www.swiftdeck.com or http://www.patiomakeover.com

Share This

We have a very strange relationship with the furniture in our house. At least most of us anyway. We run to the store, see something we love, can’t wait to get it home and then finally after it’s delivered and we get to admire how beautiful our home now is, we then wait until we start to see spider webs and dust bunnies before we clean under, over or around it. Funny how we just expect it to sit there and serve our purpose and yet not give it one-tenth the care that it deserves.

Admit it. Unless you’re a real little Suzy Homemaker, dusting your coffee table or vacuuming your sofa is not exactly on the top of your list of things to do. There’s always something else to do, like go to work, cook dinner, wash the dishes, do the laundry, or whatever else we have laying around the house. Oh and paying the bills is a definite top priority. Of course for some of us, they sometimes take a back seat as well.

And it’s funny how when we’re sitting in the living room and watching TV and sipping our glass of cola or whatever we’re drinking, we’ll take a moment to wipe up the water spot on the table but we’ll completely disregard the ten tons of dust that’s accumulated around that water spot. Would it kill us to take a dust rag to the table and clean it off? It takes all of maybe two minutes to dust an average size coffee table. Yet, we don’t do it until it gets to the point where people start to talk or you can’t find your pencil for doing the crossword puzzle.

And our lamps? Forget about every dusting around them. There’s always a great excuse for that too. They’re on and too hot to get near. And after all, you can’t dust in the dark so you can’t turn the lamp off to dust it. Next time you get the chance, take a good look under the lamp shade. You’ll see a family of heaven knows what growing under there. But the worst offenders have to be the sofas. These are for sitting on, period. And since we’re not exactly dirt free why bother cleaning our sofa on a regular basis? It isn’t until we spill something on them that stains because it is a different color than the sofa that we finally do something to make it look a little more presentable. And let’s not even get into cleaning under or behind the sofa. This is where things that we’ve lost disappear to. It’s also where the king of the dust bunny family lives. And of course the excuse for not cleaning under and behind the sofa is obvious. It’s too big and heavy to move. And where would we move it to? There’s way too much furniture around to move it more than a couple of inches and there’s no way we’re going to start moving all the furniture around.

Yes, we hate to clean our furniture. Make no mistake about it. And what we hate even more than that is having to explain to our kids why their friends aren’t allowed in the house until after spring cleaning.

Share This