How to Spot Furniture Quality - Dressers

Hello friends, have you ever been out shopping for furniture and wanted to know just how to determine the quality of a certain furniture piece? Well by now many of you know I worked for a furniture company before but what you may not know is I learned a whole lot about the quality of furniture and I thought how fitting will it be if I could help you when you’re out looking for quality in your furniture purchase.

What quality means to me is excellence, value, superiority, and worth so if you add all those things up you get a high ticket purchase but for these high quality furniture pieces ones may expect to pay for it.

Now there are multitudes of ways that furniture can be built better or cheaper and every manufacture has their own way of doing what they do. It would be impossible to detail all of them. The objective here is to give a comprehensive outline of those features of construction and materials which are commonly found in better grades of furniture.

Shopping for a dresser! How to find a quality one?

The finish should be smooth and satisfying to the touch. If stain or varnish is employed in the finish, it should be applied evenly and to a uniform thickness. For design and decoration reasons, most of the structural details of furniture are hidden. Most of the details and construction features of well-made furniture as you may be aware of can’t be seen and almost none of the benefits are visible.

Now friends when you’re out at the furniture store and the salesperson comes up to you and ask you what you’re looking for and you tell him/her you’re looking for a quality dressers, the salespersons or person should be aware of such quality and not just a pleasing to the eye structure dresser but he/she should be able to show you the unseen hidden under the beauty benefits. Now I talked about how the finish should look and feel but before all of that the dresser had to be made and put together right?

Here is what you should be looking for in a high quality dresser- Dovetail Joints

What is a dovetail joint? Dovetails have traditionally been considered a benchmark for quality drawer construction. Its purpose is to stabilize drawer fronts so that years of use won’t loosen them. Here is what a dovetail looks like.

Dovetail Joints

Double groove and loose tongue joint-tongue and groove

The two comes together and this is what you get

Now as I mentioned earlier you won’t be able to see any of these benefits just by looking at the dresser or opening the drawer, this is when you tell the salesperson or interior designer who’s shopping with you to pull the drawers out and then you can see if that particular drawer has a dovetail joint.

You may also want to ask the store salespersons if the piece was made with solid hardwood throughout or are there some veneers that are present and if so it doesn’t mean you don’t have a quality piece it’s just a method that was used.

Now friends if cost is in issue and a quality piece aren’t as important, there are cheaper options such as particle board. Particleboard is cheaper than, not as strong as your hardwoods but it’s substituted for them when looks and strength are less important than cost.

So friends the next time you’re looking for a quality dresser at your local furniture store remember to have the salesperson pull out the drawer and look for dovetail joints.

What do you think?

Are you looking for a well structured dresser?

What matters most to you; strength or appearance?

Let me know in your comment below!

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