On Wed, 01 May 2013 18:36:15 -0500, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet
wrote:

On 5/1/2013 1:48 PM, Lee Michaels wrote:


"Leon" lcb11211@swbelldotnet wrote

I am going to call you on that one, considering furniture, I seriously
doubt that most people today realize that there is better furniture to
be had. Most people that I have dealt with think they have good
furniture. They see how I build my furniture and that is generally all
they need to see to commission me to build for them.


Yep, that is soooo... true.

As someone who was raised on home built and second hand furniture, I did
not know how BAD conventional furniture was until I got out in the world
and saw it for the first time. I was amazed how flimsy a lit of it
was. I remember building some bookshelves that did not fit in a
particular space. I gave the bookshelves to my sister. She, and her
house visitors, were amazed on how "sturdy" the bookshelves were. That
was over 25 years ago. Visitors to her house, 25 years later, still
remark on how "sturdy" those shelves are.

That only means one thing. There is a lot of crap out there and when
people run into something different, it is a bit of a revelation for them.

Another thing. I came to the big city and had access to hardware
stores, lumber yards, tools, classified ads, garage sales, etc. Far
more resources than I had growing up. So I started building. And
immediately got lots of criticism for ''too many fasteners", "too many
braces", "too heavy" furniture", etc. Apparently if you weren't
building low quality, wobbly stuff, you weren't doing it right!

People raised around crap go through a change when exposed to the good
stuff. I have been a corrupting force in this regard.

I mean, really, who sets out to build wobbly crap? Either you don't
know any better or you just don't care.





And the shame of it all, I am not really impressed with the vast
majority of the stuff being offered, even the good stuff, with one
exception. I recently ordered 6 dining room chairs from an Amish
furniture store. These are well built, comfortable,and all solid wood
chairs. Not all Amish furniture is great but the worse is typically as
good as all the others best.

Our dining and bedroom furniture is all Amish (Mission style) Cherry.
Nice stuff but it wasn't cheap. It was about the same price as top
end furniture store stuff (about $15K for both rooms).

Several years ago we had an upper end furniture store that sold the
Mission style, Stickley brand furniture. From the front it looked nice
but it showed signs of being mass produced and the back sides looked
terrible.

Does anyone really look at the back sides? I find that most stuff in
the furniture stores has a really cheap looking finish, even the top
of the line stuff. It seems that *dark* stain is back in, too. Ick!
That's what people want, though.