How often do you get home after work with a sore back, stiff neck and shoulders, and a headache from your PC screen? What health problems are your old, slightly broken but still functional ' and therefore not yet ready for replacing ' office chairs and desks causing you and your employees?
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As technology leaps forward, more and more of us find ourselves behind a desk, sitting on some kind of office chair, staring at a computer screen all day. Whether you're a cog in the company wheel, or the owner, whether you work for yourself from home or sit in a large open-plan office, you're going to spend a good third of every day at your job ' if not more.
So if we spend so much time at it, why are we buying so much bad furniture?
Making sure your company culture is right is important, but making sure you and your staff are physically taken care of is just as important ' if not more so. Good quality, sturdy office furniture can help promote physical wellbeing, reducing sick days and increasing productivity.
Here are ten questions you should be asking the supplier when you buy office furniture ' whether it's an office for 200 people or just you in your home office.
1 ' What furniture do I really need?
You may think you need a desk and chair per employee and have done with it. But consider different working styles. Some people may prefer the type of desk that lets them work standing as well as sitting, while someone may prefer sitting on a Pilates ball for part of the day.
You may have a pool of freelancers who don't use the office daily and could share one desk space. Work out what you really need before buying too much or too little furniture.
2 ' How long is it going to last?
The manufacturing quality of furniture is very important. One person sitting in a chair for eight hours each day, five days a week, puts a lot of strain on it, and if it's poorly made, it's going to break sooner than later.
A desk that can barely hold the weight of a laptop isn't much good, especially if that desk belongs to the office's bric-a-brac enthusiast and her collection of china puppies.
3 ' What is it made of?
Knowing what your furniture is made of is useful for a number of reasons, including knowing how easily you'll be able to get a replacement if, for example, one of the desk supports buckles.
It also helps to know the materials if you are trying to Green your office ' far better to buy sustainably farmed local pine or recycled metal than mass-produced hard new plastic.
4 ' What kind of returns policy and warranty does it come with?
Even great quality furniture could come with a flaw, or simply not work in your office due to space constraints. Knowing you have the option to return it within a few days if it doesn't work, or that it will be replaced if it breaks, makes a big difference.
5 ' What does it really cost?
Does the price tag include sales tax? What about delivery fees? If you're buying wooden furniture, does it include finishes, or is that the raw wood price? Is that fully installed, or flat-packed?
Make sure you get the full quote before you commit, so that you don't get any nasty surprises on the invoice.
6 ' How much space and privacy does each person need and have?
A copywriter needs a different amount of space to a bookkeeper, and an architect needs different space to a customer service representative. Someone who spends a lot of time on the needs a quieter, more private space to people working on a collaborative team all day.
Know what each person or group of people needs before mass-buying identical desks and chairs for people with vastly different requirements.
7 ' What style works for the company?
Are you a young, modern company, or an older, more traditional company? Is your company personality better reflected in solid oak desks with leather tops, or trestles and worktops? Overstuffed armchairs or light and portable collapsible stools? What kind of impression do you hope to give customers who visit your office?
8 ' What kind of company culture is it going to encourage?
The furniture you choose and the way you lay it out is going to have a significant effect on the company culture. You need to consider whether you want to encourage teamwork or individuality, a fun and innovative atmosphere or a serious and dedicated one, a company where people want to gain experience and grow fast, or one where they want to settle into a long, stable career.
9 ' Do I need flexibility or stability?
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Some companies need people to be able to move around quickly and easily, change workstations within minutes rather than days, and be able to join a new team at a moment's notice. Others need long-term planning, teams that grow and work together for years and a sense of place.
The furniture you choose needs to fit into the kind of flexibility or stability you want.
10 ' References
Finally, get references from the company making or providing your furniture. Ask for local references, whose offices you can visit to see for yourself if it works, of they know what they're doing, and what quality their furniture really is.
Bonus question: Can I buy furniture online?
It depends on the design. Pricing is driven by three factors: Size, complexity, and materials. Large tables and complicated designs take longer to build and cost more than smaller and simpler tables. Complex finishes take more time than simple clear coats. Material costs vary depending on whether the table is made of wood or laminate, and what power/data units are used. The shape of the table also contributes, and whether we are producing one table or multiple copies of a single design. All of our conference room tables are made in the same shop by the same craftsmen, to the highest standard of quality.
This formula doesn't cover every possible type and configuration of conference room table we make, but it does work for most of our choices. To further clarify, we've sorted our portfolio by price group. STANDARD GRADE ($600 ' $ a foot) are the lowest cost. PREMIUM GRADE ($-$ a foot) represent great value. They have a good combination of features and materials, making for an impressive table without too many extras. And ULTRA GRADE tables are designed to dazzle, with the finest materials and most imaginative design.
Modular Table Costs: Modular tables are made in quantity, and tend to be much smaller than our other tables. This changes the standard pricing equation. It's hard to give a simple formula that covers every option, but here are some numbers to consider:
Contact us and we'll help you make prudent choices about what features to include or omit to meet your budget.
Building custom conference tables from scratch takes time. Your delivery dates will be confirmed when you place your order, and will reflect our backlog at that moment. We ship most of our tables within 8 to 12 weeks of receiving an order. When we are exceptionally busy, it can take longer. If you need it faster, tell us and we'll see what we can do. Our promise: if we say it will be there on a particular day, IT WILL BE THERE. We understand tight deadlines and we never mislead our clients about timing.
Since our roots are as a woodworking shop, most of our tables are made of wood. (We also use lots of other materials ' see the other FAQs for more information.) Wood comes in three types: solids, veneers, and engineered panels. All of these come from a tree. After felling, logs are processed into chunks of solid lumber, or sliced into thin sheets of veneer. Some parts of the log are unsuitable for either lumber or veneers ' these are made into engineered boards, which we use for the internal structure of the table. Each type of wood is best used for a particular task:
Unfortunately, solid wood has some inconvenient properties. It will change dimension whenever the weather changes: humid weather makes it get bigger and dry weather makes it shrink. This can cause warping and cracking, and limits the size of panel that can be made entirely out of solid lumber. Solid wood also has variable appearances and structures. Each tree's grain responds to its local environment, so there are wide variations in appearance and strength in any pile of lumber. And there are always knots. Lots and lots of knots.
We apply a solid wood edge to all of our table tops to keep the veneers from being damaged. Table bases are made from either a combination of solids and veneers, or, for a lower cost, entirely of plywood and MDF.
Yes, we can. We've made hundreds of dining tables from solid wood. We also make tables from large slabs, leaving the natural edges in place, but solid wood is not best for every situation. Solid panels larger than 4'x 8' are prone to warping and cracking, because the wood changes size in response to weather changes. Accommodating that movement requires careful consideration. It's risky to ship solid top tables to very dry environments (looking at you, Arizona.) It can also be difficult to incorporate a lot of power/data equipment into solid tops. We will discuss the particulars of your situation to see whether solids or veneers are best. All we want is for the table to be as well built and durable as it can be.
Veneered furniture has been around a long time. There were veneered pieces in King Tut's tomb, which have survived years. Ever since then, many of the most expensive and spectacular pieces of furniture in history were made using veneers. Nowadays, veneered furniture occupies both ends of the economic spectrum. Industrial methods have made it possible to make cheap veneered panels, and techniques have been developed to build this into very cheap furniture. This is why veneer has a bad reputation. A lot more people have had a poor experience with lousy veneered furniture than have enjoyed owning very high quality work. We aren't interested in making cheap furniture, so our veneered work is done with the techniques that stand the test of time. Think of veneer as you would beef: your dinner may be delicious or disgusting, but you don't blame the cow. It's up to the chef to use the ingredients properly. Same with veneers. Built properly, veneer furniture is as durable as solid.
Plastic laminate (aka Formica) is an incredibly useful material for table tops. It's inexpensive, extremely durable, and comes in a huge variety of patterns and colors. We use laminate when the table will receive hard use and/or the client is trying to keep costs low. When we use laminates, we can eliminate most of the finishing labor involved in producing a table, and that's often a significant savings. About a third of the tables we make are built with laminate tops. Laminate tops can be combined with a solid wood edge and base for a more elegant look with enhanced durability. Our design engineers will discuss your situation with you and recommend whether wood, laminate, or another material is best for you.
We use them all. Let's start with solid surface materials, AKA Corian. There are actually a lot of manufacturers making this stuff, and they each have their own sets of colors and patterns. All of these materials are excellent substitutes for marble or granite. They are almost as durable, more repairable, lighter weight (which facilitates shipping and installation), and we can fabricate them in our shop. And we can mix the solid surface with both wood and metal.
We also make conference tables with marble and granite. These materials are extremely heavy, and require careful engineering so that the base has sufficient heft. They are also hard to move. When we work with stone, we use local fabricators who are familiar with local delivery procedures to do our fabricating. We manage the project and take care of the structure of the table.
Glass is similar to stone in that it's very heavy and hard to move around. When the client wants a table without any wiring, we can work with a local glass company, while we design the base and handle the project management. When glass is needed to cover a wood table that has power/data units, we bring the glass panels to our shop and fabricate the table, then ship the whole package together.
We use metal in many ways, both as a surface material and as a structural material. You can see many examples here: Tables with Metal
For more info, read about these and other conference table materials.
We use commercial trucking services to move the table from our shop to you. This allows us to ship work anywhere on the continent quickly, at a reasonable cost. Conference tables are large and bulky, but we build and pack them so that they can be shipped without damage. Your table will be made in pieces, with a maximum size of 4 feet x 8 feet (the size of a standard sized sheet of plywood). All of the pieces will be wrapped in foam, and then enclosed in another layer of cardboard, with heavy duty cardboard corner protectors. Then, all of those pieces will put into a custom crate designed to provide superior protection during transit.
The pallets are large and heavy. Most of them are 4 feet wide, 8 feet long, and 4.5 feet high, and weigh between 500 and pounds. A loading dock and pallet jack, or a forklift, is required to safely remove the crate from the truck. Because of this problem, we offer two levels of delivery service:
Inside delivery: We will ship to a local furniture installer. We use Installnet to identify quality local installers, or we will work with whatever provider you prefer. The installer will be able to get the pallet off the truck, and then bring the wrapped pieces into your space, unwrap them, and assemble the table.
You assemble: If you have the ability to receive a pallet and move the pieces into your space, then we can ship directly to you. Our tables are designed to be very easy to assemble ' any handy person can do it. We can offer discounts on our list pricing if you take over this part of the job..
Cost: Freight and delivery costs vary widely, depending on how far you are from the shop and whether you can receive freight. Most of the time the cost of moving the table to you is around 10% of the item cost. But not always. We will quote these costs along with the table, once the design is settled.
Contact us to discuss your requirements of Customized Tables And Chairs Suppliers. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.