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Furniture Buying Tips from the Experts

Imagine buying a beautiful piece of furniture that you cherish for decades until you pass it onto your children. The unfortunate reality is that a lot of new furniture loses its luster and falls apart long before that happens. That’s because there’s a big difference in heirloom quality furniture and big box store furniture. We’ve put together our furniture buying tips to help you find your dream heirloom.

At B&L Woodworking, we’re a team of Amish Furniture craftsmen who build a wide range of indoor furniture, including tables, chairs, desks, bedroom sets, and much more. Everything we build, we build to serve our customers for decades. Keep reading to discover our expert furniture buying tips — or reach out to our team right now to have us build something beautiful for you!

Furniture Quality Guide: 4 Key Questions to Ask

From a stately dining room table to the striking desk in a home office, a piece of furniture can make a sincere impact on our lives. Considering the style, a new piece of furniture can reinvent how a room looks and feels. From a practical standpoint, you’re investing a bit of money in this furniture piece, so you need it to last. Our furniture quality guide centers on the four questions that ensure your new piece will be fantastic from both a stylistic AND a practical purpose:

Ask About the Material — This simple question can tell you quite a lot about the piece of furniture you’re considering. High-quality wooden furniture only comes from one thing: real wood. So, if the salesman starts to list off a series of composite products (like laminate or particle board) when you ask, that’s a sign you’re getting a lesser quality product. Not only will these products never have the true up-close luster of wood, but they will be far more likely to scratch, fade, chip, and fall apart.
Find the furniture style that’s perfect for you.
Ask the Craftsman’s Name or Where the Piece Was Built — This furniture buying tip is something of a trick you can play. Generally, heirloom quality furniture is made by small teams of skilled craftsmen in a workshop. For example, our furniture is made in Lancaster County, PA, by a small team of Amish craftsmen. On the other hand, big box store furniture is often made on assembly lines, in huge factories overseas. The salesman may want to try to pass their furniture off as heirloom quality, but these furniture quality guide questions should reveal the truth.
Ask If You Can Look at the Connections — All pieces of furniture, from small chairs to king-size bedframes, are put together with many different pieces of wood. Look closely at where the pieces of wood were connected — these spots will tell you a lot about the skill behind the craftsmanship. If you see a large seam of glue or obvious nails, that’s a sign you aren’t looking at the best piece of furniture. In fact, hiding these connections is something of an art in furniture making — so the less you see, the better.
Ask about Custom Options — This next point in our furniture quality guide will help you be sure you’re getting honest quality. When you buy mass-produced furniture from a chain store, you get only what they sell. There’s no room for custom ideas or for personal touches. So, if you’re wondering whether the piece in the showroom you’re considering is of lasting quality, ask for a custom change. If they can’t accommodate that, it’s a sign the piece is just a standard product — not a true case of heirloom furniture.

At B&L Woodworking, we love building unique pieces of furniture for our clients. Whether you’d like to see a small change to one of our popular styles — or you want to build something custom with us from the ground up — we’d love to work with you!

B&L Woodworking: Building Outdoor Quality

We hope our furniture quality guide is able to help you find the piece of your dreams. We hear from a lot of homeowners that they appreciate our custom building process and our commitment to real quality in today’s world.

We also bring that same dedication of quality to our line of luxury outdoor structures. Our Amish craftsmen proudly build:

Pergolas
Pavilions
Gazebos
Pool Houses
Chicken Coops
Dog Kennels
Sheds

Talk Furniture Buying Tips & Your Heirloom

The piece of furniture you buy today can absolutely be something you use for life. It all depends on where you buy it. At B&L Woodworking, building quality furniture for people just like you is our mission. If you want to talk more about these furniture buying tips — or discuss your custom heirloom — please reach out.

Start the conversation about your new piece of heirloom furniture today!

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