Any weekend where you are dragged off to go shopping with your partner to a home improvement or do it yourself store is always going to be a bad one. These stores offer many things that are very good and interesting but so much of the produce within them is the same as you can buy anywhere else. If you are not careful you can end up getting carried away and buying some furniture from one of these stores for a fair some of money and end up turning your home into something not too dissimilar from the pages in an interior design magazine. The thing to remember with interior design magazines is that they are designed to give you ideas for how to lay out your home, not for you to completely replicate.

There is no getting away from it but the furniture that you can buy in the home improvement and the do it yourself store are good enough to serve a purpose, very little more. If you need to buy furniture and you are seriously considering buying from one of these stores you should do a little equation in your head, price of piece of furniture divided by number of years that you will get good use out of it. Then do the same equation with a piece of furniture that has been made by a craftsman and see how the results stack up.

Designer furniture is better, that much is obvious, but why is it better and how does it stack up that spending what can amount to three times the amount of money for a piece of furniture be good sense. Furniture designers or cabinet makers manufacture pieces of furniture for homes and for people who understand the value of quality. These pieces are made to exact measurements and worked by hand to ensure that every door, drawer and panel fit precisely and snugly together. This is the only way that a piece of furniture will survive the test of time.

The materials that are used are also of a higher quality than those used in the mass produced furniture industry. All pieces are made of a solid piece of timber that is machined and cut to length to guarantee the same quality runs through the unit. Each piece will be hand finished with abrasive paper and a plane to get rid of any rough surfaces and finally either a coat of wood preserver, lacquer or varnish will be applied to hold the natural beauty of the wood for ever as well as protecting the piece of designer furniture from the atmosphere.

A piece of designer furniture is something to be proud of, it is something that can be admired and enjoyed, unlike the cheaper mass produced pieces which purely serve a purpose within the home. With all of these factors put together you can begin to see where the difference comes in and why you pay more for the designer piece. The craftsman who makes the designer furniture will have worked in his trade all of his life, the lad who works the machine that makes the mass produced furniture started when he left school. That is why you pay more for designer furniture and that is why the extra money that you pay is worth every cent.

By: Harwood E Woodpecker