What's in the wood?

Solid Wood

You may think that Solid Wood furniture may be your first choice for quality furniture, however it is not always the most practical choice.

Solid wood may move and widen when exposed to moisture, and may shrink when it is dried. The industry standard for furniture timber is under 12% moisture content. This would be no problem if the furniture has been in an equally dry atmosphere through its production and finishing, storage, shipping, warehousing and delivery. Wide solid wood panels and thick leg-posts or bed-posts may shrink, crack and split.

This is why we use eco-friendly edge or face laminated pine from SA sawmills which still offers the benefits of solid wood furniture but gives the added strength of several grains joined together with non-toxic woodglue giving the most healthy option for our children when sealed with waterbased products.

Veneers

These sound cheap and nasty, but in reality you are enjoying the beauty of timber grain without exploiting timber resources. You can own a mahogany headboard which only has mahogany on the top 3mm of the surface, (after all, unless you are going to start chopping into it you will never really appreciate the other 22mm beneath the surface anyway).

Veneers offer much more than a simple saving in natural timber resources by the fact that you only require such a small amount of solid timber to enjoy the natural timber grain, you also have a wonderful choice of fine and very beautiful timber veneers, many of which would not be stable enough to use in a solid format. Usually a cheaper timber such as a pine, or a plywood, or MDF, or a chipboard is used underneath the veneer..

Laminates and Wood-Based Panels

These dictate how stable and durable your furniture is regardless of how beautiful it may appear from a distance.

There are a few basic types: Plywoods; block-boards; edge and face laminates and; wood-based fibre-boards.

Plywood can be excellent material. Cabinet gables, doors, drawer boxes, shelves; its stability and rigidity are generally superior to wood-fibre based board materials (which have a tendency to sag when used as shelves).

Block-Board is a construction of more affordable shorter timber lengths bonded into a panel and faced front and back with a veneer. Despite how this sounds, it creates a stable panel suitable for many furniture applications, and is superior in stability to wood-fibre based board materials.

Edge and face laminated furniture boards are also made up of a construction of more affordable shorter timber lengths bonded into a panel creating a beautiful chopping block effect. This creates a stable furniture board suitable for many furniture applications, and is superior in stability to wood-fibre based board materials.

ChipBoard is what it says it is, a board made from wood-chips. It is one of the most common board materials used in furniture construction, and generally speaking it is perfectly okay for light use. It must be veneered and edged to make it acceptable for furniture use, and often [in kitchen and children's furniture applications] is faced with hard-wearing melamine.

MDF, Medium Density Fibreboard is a material made from bonded wood-dust. It has become very common in children's furniture. It offers excellent stability, durability and strength, and can be finished with a veneer or painted with excellent results.

The primary concern with MDF is the make-up of the material, which is wood-dust bonded with a urea-formaldehyde resin. However, very dangerous as this resin is, the risk is only present during manufacture when the material is machined and the dust is created. Once the MDF is encapsulated with paint or lacquers the risk of dust is no longer present.