Cubism – the art of getting organized with Cubes and cubbies

With all the papers, books, games, toys, and electronics that float around our houses, its a wonder that we can ever find anything. We loosely group things together and store them in piles which quickly turns into chaotic clutter.

The Cube… a classic shape that can be adapted to fit any style and space. Its straight clean lines can provide a sharp modern accent to a room or perhaps soften the space with rounded edges and a light color stain.

Organization and efficiency are high priorities in this age of technology but no app can keep your house in order; all it takes is a simple wooden cube or a collection of them. Cubes can be utilized in any part of the house to store just about anything.  A single cube can organize your Xbox games while a pyramid of cubes can store an entire library of books. Need a maintainable way to organize clothes? With cubes you can sort clothing into style, color, season, or any desirable category.

Get creative:

• Build a wall of cubes for maximum storage space:
  • stackable
  • mountable
• Place a single cube.
• Use cubes as drawers for cubbies.
• Use inserts to transform a cube into a wine rack.
• Great in:
  • craft rooms
  • mud rooms
  • kids rooms

  Transform your space into an architectural masterpiece (and be able to find your stuff)!

Wires – don’t forget them when you buy an entertainment center

In our life as a unfinished furniture store, we build a lot of media/ entertainment centers for people. One thing that a lot of people don’t think about is wires. Once i get my TV into this great piece of furniture, how do i run the wires. When we deliver something we don’t always have the tools to cut those holes with us. This means that either you have to get someone else to cut them or reschedule another day for us to come back. This costs us time and means that you can’t use your furniture the way you were hoping when it is delivered.

So what’s the solution? A little forethought! Now that you know about the problem, try to think out what need to run wires and where do they need to go. You may need holes cut in the inside of the piece so that wires can be run from one section to the other. Or perhaps you just need a few holes cut in the back.

Below are a list of questions to help you think about wires:

• What components need access to electrical power and where can they get it?
• What components need to run wires to other components (speaks, TVs, Blue-ray…)
• Are their any light switches that i might cover up? Do i want to cut a hole for them?
• If my furniture goes where i want to put it, I’m i going to cover up any electrical outlets or light switches and if so is that a problem? Do i still need access to them?

Asking yourself a few of these questions when you design your furniture and place your order can save you hours/ days of waiting for holes  to be cut after the fact. Also if we know about them before hand they may be able to be cut in the shop before your piece is finished so they will be cleaner and neater than we can do if we have to do them on delivery.

Why i love pine furniture

Have you ever seen something that brought back something from your childhood or just made you think of home? I’m from North Carolina, born in Raleigh, and pine trees and pine furniture does that for me. We call them Carolina Pines, those flimsy, retched little trees that grow like weeds in this state, but we love them. I have some wooden furniture made by my grandfather that he built out of pine. It’s lovely stuff really. So because of the family and state associations I love pine furniture. There’s something warm about the grain and the knots. Perhaps its a picture of how life is not perfect, but has its dark spots. whatever the reason. I love the way it looks.

My family’s unfinished furniture company, Durham Bookcases, used to build pine furniture. When we went into Afghanistan, the price for furniture-grade pine went up so high we had to look for an alternative (for some reason people did not want to pay oak or maple prices for pine furniture). In the past six months the cost for good pine materials has come down. So we’ve started building pine furniture again. This makes me happy. It’s great because it has a great price and it’s still good quality that sturdy and will last. Our pine products are available with just about as many options and customizations as the birch or oak/ maple line that you can get most anything you need in that down-home, warm pine grain.

This is why i love pine furniture. It’s simple, unassuming, and makes me think of home and family.I hope you like it too.

Unfinished for small spaces – why unfinished furniture is great for small rooms

Even though houses are larger than they were 50 years ago, we still have small rooms that can be hard to decorate. Designing a small rooms is a balance of style and utility. Unfinished furniture is great for small spaces for the following reasons:

1. You control the interaction between color [1] , space [2], and psychology.
2. You can find furniture that fits your space and not have to make the space fit the furniture
3. You can get the features you need in one piece and possibly create multipurpose furniture thus saving space.
4. You can get what you need without having to buy something bigger just because smaller sizes are not popular on the market.

For a small space, nothing gives you options like unfinished furniture. Check out your local unfinished furniture store and manufacturer to see what’s available and if you happen to be near Durham, NC come check us out at Durham Bookcases (www.thebookcaseshop.com)

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[1] http://www.precisionintermedia.com/color.html

[2] http://www.invitinghome.com/Idias_Advice/Decorating_Colors_Effect.htm#2

Unfinished by design – Why Unfinished furniture supports your style

Claim:Unfinished Furniture fits your home like nothing else can.

If this sounds like a strong claim, it is meant to be, but I think I can prove it. Unfinished furniture is just that: unfinished. This offes you three advantages.

1. You can focus on natural grain pattern,
2. you focus on the shape of the piece without being distracted by color, and
3. you can choose the color that goes with your style.

That’s the argument in bullet points.

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Grain: If you buy a piece in a store, then you get to see the grain of the wood before its stained or painted. You can see what characteristics it has and how it fits your style. If you want knots go for pine, if you want a heavy grain then check out oak, if you want a smooth finish then try birch or maple.

Shape: Unfinished furnitue stores usually have a good selection in store to choose from in a wide varity of styles. Most likely you’ll be able to find piece that have the shape you are looking for whether you style is cottage, traditional, or mid-century modern. Because the pieces are unfinished you don’t have to worry about finding the perfect peice in the wrong color. Also you’re not likely to miss the perfect shape/style just because the owner of the store thought seseme-chicken orange was going to be the new style for side tables.

Color: Once you find that perfect shape, you can finish it any way you like. Pick any color you want. If you can find it in a hardware store’s paint section you can probably put in on your furntiure. You’re not limited in how the colors are applied when you buy unfinished furniture. If you want it distressed, take a chain to it, paint/stain it, and then sand the edges a bit to make the piece look worn. If you want a glaze, put on your base color an then add the glaze to your hearts content (check out Show & Tell‘s post on how to glaze furniture). If you don’t want to tackle the finsh yourself, most unfinished furniture stores have a finishing service.

Conclusion: Unfinished furniture supports your style like nothing else can because it lets you choose the grain pattern, shape of the furniture, and color in ways that prefinished furniture can’t. You already know your style and with unfinished furniture you can make your furniture reflect who you are and what you want your space to be.

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Green Bookcases – why buy quality? (part I)

Thesis 1: Cheap furniture does not care about the environment.

Here’s why. When you buy something that is made from cheap materials, it breaks eventually, and then you either have to do without or replace it. Doing without would be the most friendly option, but that does not work all that often and you still have to dispose of the broken furniture. That disposal probably means a landfill.

So a cheap piece of furniture broke and now is sitting in a landfill. All the energy that went into making it, the natural resources and materials, and any man-made resources (toxic or otherwise) are now waiting to rot.  That is why cheap furniture does not care about the environment.

We have to have furniture so what’s the alternative? Buy quality products and choose to value durability and a good investment over getting any old thing at the cheapest price possible. Choose Green Designs which are “intended to develop more environmentally benign products and processes” [1]. These are designs that focus on using more natural materials (wood instead of plastics that can’t be recycled) and limiting the amount of natural resources required to produce a product.  So we consume less.

What does this mean for you? Simple. Look for green furniture when you’re shopping. Don’t buys things that are going to break and have to be replaced in two years. It will probably cost you more in the long run and it chews up resources and gluts our landfills with things that don’t have to be there.

(Part II is forthcoming)

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[1] Hendrickson, Chris, Noellette Conway-Schempf, Lester Lave, and Francis McMichael. 2012. “Introduction to Green Design.” Green Design Institute. Accessed January 11. http://gdi.ce.cmu.edu/education/courses.html.

Urban Living – furniture?

	At Durham bookcase we build a line of unfinished and custom finished bookcases we call “Urban Living” (http://www.bookcaseshop.com/bk826793.aspx). I noticed that it is one of the most viewed pages on our website. This makes me wonder. Is this a function of changes in people’s taste or is it because we’re located in the Brightleaf or American Tobacco district of Durham, NC.
In our neighborhood, they’ve been renovating the old tobacco warehouses and turning them into apartment and condos (they’re beautiful by the way). So are people showing interest in “Urban Living” bookcases because that is just what people want or do people want them because they’re moving into new urban apartment

Unfinished Ideas

This is my first post as a blogger, much less an employee of a furniture company. I work for Durham Bookcases. It’s my family’s unfinished furniture store on Duke street in Durham, NC (hence the name of this blog). I’ve worked there for about 2  years now, but my uncle, Phillip Fletcher (the owner), has been in the furniture business since the 1960 when he and my grandmother started refinishing and selling antiques. After open and closing American International Furniture, a upholstery and unfinished furniture store, my uncle Phillip went into the bookcase business and started manufacturing unfinished bookcases in the back part of the building on Duke street and The Bookcase Shop was born. Later in 2004 (if my memory serves me correctly), he decided to open a retail store and Durham Bookcases was born.

Different family’s have different ideas and passions. If for the Kennedy’s it was politics, but for my family it was wood and wood furniture. You would not think of all that goes into taking pieces of wood and turning them into the furniture that you see around you. Besides the obvious stuff like sanding, cutting parts, glue and nails, there’s computer programming. Before anything is cut,  there’s the design stage. This is when you sit and fiddle with 1/8ths of an inch to get everything to fit just right while trying to balance environmental responsibility, efficiency, and profitability with the need of your customers.

The cool thing about our company is that we build lots of furniture you can come in, buy, and take with you, but we also do custom design work. If you need a library or home office, that’s the kind of thing we do. This picture is just an example of a library we designed, built and delivered (up a winding staircase with low ceilings and no i’m not bitter 🙂 ).

This wall unit was designed in 8 pieces. 4 tops and 4 bottoms. Custom hardware was added to the doors, which have hidden hinges. The unit was painted with a custom color the customer chose. And it looked perfect with the decor of the apartment.

I hope that we can put up other posts about similar projects and some other things involved in making and selling finished and unfinished furniture in Durham, NC. In the meantime check out our website at www.thebookcaseshop.com.