9 Tips for Bringing the Satisfying Wooden Furniture Home

At present, furniture sold in the market simply consists of wooden furniture and board furniture. However, all the pieces of furniture put in the shopping mall are finished products, which is hard to identify whether it is made of solid wood or board. It’s difficult for customers to tell from the appearance. Only after mastering some selecting and purchasing techniques, can you avoid to bring some flashy but shoddy furniture home.

Then, how to select and purchase the real wooden furniture? Let’s see some useful techniques.

1. What are the common solid wood materials?

This is the direct factor that influences the quality and the price. The ordinary wooden furniture is commonly made of beech, white oak, northeast China ash, elm, catalpa wood, rubber wood, and Chinese oak, while redwood furniture mainly adopts rosewood, wenge, and padauk. There are many shoddy products leading to the solid wood furniture market disorder. Therefore, it’s better to purchase the brand products. What needs attention is that the price of the wood materials are rising, that is, products with excessively low price must be fake.

2. How to identify the real solid wood material?

One of the secret techniques of identifying the real solid wood furniture is: wood grain and knurl. For example, if there is a grain on the surface of a wardrobe door, and you can find a relative grain at the relative place of the opposite side of the door, this door is absolutely made of solid wood. And then identifying from the knurl is also practical and useful: find the grain at the relative position of the other side according to the the place of the knurl on the surface.


3. How to figure out the quality of the solid wood?

Open the doors of the cabinets and the drawers to observe if the wood material is dry, pure white, compact in texture, and exquisite. If there is chipboard, density board, or dieplate added into the furniture, you should open the cabinet doors and drawers to smell whether there is pungent smell or not.

4. Observe if the wood material has defect

The most force-bearing parts such as uprightly post, and the load-bearing panels close to the floor connecting the the posts shouldn’t have any knurls or cracks. The structure should be firm and the frame shouldn’t be loosen, and the split tenon and material fracture is not allowed. All the artificial panels should have edge banding.

5. Observe the strength of the panel
You can use your finger to press the panel to test its strength. A framework of “#-shape”should be set on one side of the panel to fit the whole structure. If the framework is not firm, the panel will shake when pressed. The bottom board of the drawer should adopt several layers, and a large board should adopt 5 layers to ensure the firmness. Cabinet doors and drawers should be flexible in opening and closing. When the panels need covering, the covering materials should have the similar color with the panels, and wrinkling, clamminess, and exposed undercoat should be avoided.

6. Check the Stability and Security

Observe whether the drawers and door frames are tilt, tenons are inclined or joint holes are excessively big. Wooden furniture should ensure the stability and security. When you open two cabinet doors to 90°, and pull forward slightly, the cabinet shouldn’t fall forward. Backing panels should be installed at the back of the dressing mirrors and dressers to ensure the security. Positions such as legs, drawers, cabinet doors and supports should have enough bearing load.

7. Check the Details such as joints and sliding rails

You should select the furniture that adopts dovetails or butterfly joints. You should check if there are bolts and protection at the corners of the heavy furniture. Check if the cabinet doors, drawers and extension tables can work flexibly.

8. Check if the Surface is Smooth

Touch the surface of the furniture to check carefully if the polished surface is smooth. Positions like plinth wall shouldn’t be rough, paint and varnish shouldn’t have scratches or bubbles.

9. Check through“Upside-down” Position

Put the chairs and furniture with underlying surface upside down to observe how they were made. As for tables, you could check from the bottom. You should check if they were reinforced with bolts and wedges, whether the laths and the wales were compactly connected, and if there is extra glue or extender.