It is in this grim and very middling weather that minds tend to turn towards the comfort of a nicely furnished and decorated home that we can come home to each evening.  It is amazing just how much the phrase ‘as safe as houses’ can mean when things are truly grotty outside.  If we don’t take care of ourselves and pocessions, then everything goes to rack and ruin.  Take our furniture and effects at home, if we just buy the cheapest stuff that supermarkets and out of town emporiums stock, we are not investing in very wise buys.  TBecause of their cheapness, they are considered easily replaceable.  The local tidy tips are absolutely stacked out with broken chairs, table and cabinets that have been cast aside.  Heavy handling by the family and no respect for the beauty of anything is apparently the major cause.  The throw away today, buy new tomorrow trend worries many folk.

I feel absolutely sure that in the days when famiies had to rely on ‘hand me downs’ in both clothes and furniture/household effects, then we did have greater affection and respect for our surroundings.  Real, solid oak furniture is really worth hanging on to. The beauty of a light oak sideboard – it will glow in daylight.  The warmth of oak is one of the most endearing features and it will outlast so much more than man made.    Having a matching set of sideboard, table and chairs etc. has really enhanced my home.  I just love it.

Oh how we laughed when my partner and I moved into our first flat and suddenly had to furnish it.  Just gathering together the funds to pay the deposit and rent took all our energy – actually getting into it and living a life seemed all so much hard work!   But of course relatives came to the rescue with various items they had stashed away in attics and garages.   Very soon we had a table to eat off, two mismatched chairs and to our eternal joy, a sideboard with big cupboards and 4 capacious drawers.  This was in addition to the brown wood bed and cast iron headboard and a rather quaint pair of dressing tables.  They had been supplied as a Mr & Mrs set, the latter being made very slightly more feminine with lacy cutwork marquetry around the triple mirror and around the roof of the kneehole.

We were grateful for the items of course, but back then they seemed awfully old fashioned and we couldn’t wait until we moved to our own premises and could start again with new modern pieces for the scandinavian emporium.  However once we did move, we couldn’t bear to part with the pieces and managed to acquire other items that although did not match, they complimented our existing arrangements well.   The value of oak furniture cannot be underestimasted.  Its sheer beauty for starters and the functionality.  We did keep some of our original pieces well into twenty years but caved in to the desire for modern sleek lines – but not without passing our beloved old pieces on to student grandchildren with words of encouragment to keep hold of the heirlooms!

We must all had to rely on second hand furniture in during our lifetimes – that first flat when Grandma offers out the old brown wardrobe and Aunty Flo says you can have her old dining room set when your Uncle Albert buys her a new one. . . . Gradually over time we decide to invest in some better pices of our own and gladly dispatch the old brown’ns to the auction house or a charity shop that deals with furniture and effects.  The choosing of the new items can be so exciting but also rather annoying if the store offers super quick delivery times but these tend to slip.  This is very much a feature of the stack them high, sell’em cheap variety of mega store.  It can be so tempting to go to these huge places that sell the latest fashionable trend in furnishings;  that nice shade of sky blue pink sofa bed or whatever.  It pays however to shop around and see what exactly you get for your money as I did recently when seeking out a new sideboard.  I had seen a really lovely one in an out of town emporium.  It is light oak and the design is super modern with no frills or fussy bits.  The shade of the oak appeals greatly in that it looks sunny – as if it has absorbed the sunlight and is storing it up for me!  I already have a lovely honey coloured dining table in light oak and the sideboard would go very nicely.  However, there was some hesitation in the his voice when I asked the sales guy about delivery!  So back to my local high street family furnishing store.  May be a little dearer but much more reliable.

Ahh I just recently I had the very enviable task of looking for a new item of furniture to replace my much loved but seriously well worn two seater sofa in the family room.    I have had my main furniture for over 22 years and on the whole I’ve had fantastic service from it all.  It must be said that for much of this time, there has been only me in the house and thus it has suffered far less from the ravages of family life than most furniture of the same age.  However, it succumbed to the sudden and unexpected depositing of a very hefty rump end of a pal of mine.  She is no fan of exercise and is very solid – which caused her to go through the base of my little sofa.

Having realised that a change was now definitely needed, I searched online for where my nearest stoe might be.  I had no idea what to look for, but I sat and thought abut what I actually wanted in the same space.  I then did a circuit of four retailers.  Two were huge well known emporiums that advertise heavily.   Another was a superbly laid out ‘top notch’ store that has been going for nearly 100 years.   I eventually found exeactly what I wanted in a very local outlet that supplies oak furniture in those delightful room settings that makes one feel happy and content.  I have never walked around such attractive room settings and it made me want to change everything I have at home!

Oak is a truly fabulous resistant and strong materials for making many things – furniture in the home is a primary use of oak.   When you think that many of the oldest churches in this country date back to the 13th & 14th centuries and still contain the oak trestles, pews and testers, not to mention the fantastic altar rails and chancels.  I have in mind one particular church that has stood since 1388 and contains the ‘new pews’ from 1642.   This is always the joke. I was on duty as visitor hostess when we opened the church on the morning of the millennium – we had lots of US visitors because there was a memorial for some pilots from the 2nd world war visiting the 98th bombardment stones.   These visitors duly trooped into the church as something to pass the time.  They firstly could not get their collective heads around the fact there was a year 1388 – 300 years before the USA was seriously developing.  Then to be told the ‘new pews’ dated back to 1600s was such a puzzle to them.  But they were more than 300 years after the church was finished so when installed, each one lovingly carved by one man in the village, they were new..  The church was busier in those days and his lovingly carved pews proved to be too few so they just stuck aisle seats to each end of the pews, roughly modelled as an expedient at the time, no one ever guessing they’d still be cherished and smiled at nearly 400 years later.

When I moved into my first house, many years ago, I was  limited by way of funding.   Having stretched myself to the absolute limit to get the mortgage and settle all those annoying extras that still come as a bit of a surprise, despite my conveyancing solicitors best efforts to explain all.  Searches . . .  looking into whether the house was likely to fall into some sinister planning loophole or new road scheme compulsory purchase nightmare, or had any odd covenants on the property or the extensive garden and land attached.    So having cleared all these hurdles and found enough cash to move in,  I then had to start in earnest to get a few sticks of furniture together.  Obviously I was expected to gratefully accept all the old brown furniture that all the grandparents, great aunts and uncles known and unknown, had seen fit to keep forever.   Some of these offerings were passable and I gratefully accepted not only the proffered tables, wardrobes, chests of drawers, tall-boys and side tables,   but some of the ugly tat too just to be able to get a favourite uncle to hire a van and move it all for me.

After many years and several house moves later, I reached a point in my life when I could afford to jetison the heavy old brown stuff and buy that dream sideboard I’d seen in one of the top stores a couple of years ago and was now on sale at a very reasonable price in a discount warehouse near me.  What luck.  this gorgeous light coloured real oak beauty was available, together with a very nearly perfect matching dining table.  Sensing a possible sale, the manager measured both items and sent me home with said figures and one of his own steel tape measures to check that the sideboard would fit into the space planned.  It did and the table would be smaller than the one it would replace.  Oh my word, being able to buy these two items of oak furniture made me crazily happy and I still love them both.

I just love oak furniture – now that I am older, slightly more affluent and more decidedi n my tastes, I love the feeling of reliablility that comes with oak.  It won’t fall over or snap;  the colour is genuine and it needs very little looking after.  Ok, the man-made materials that the out of town furniture super emporiums sell in the stasck it high, sell it cheap modus operandi are great when you have a space that needs cheap furniture for the family to function.  But after years of this, we suddenly realise that hey, a decent oak table and chairs, to match a very attractive oak side board is now very much what we want.  The suppliers of oak furniture  whatever shade, be it light, medium, stained, rich dark . . . .  are now having a fantastic resurgence after some lean years of being the ‘old fashioned’ ones.  They suffered during the years of scandinavian manmade or rubber wood practicalities throughout the recessonary years of 1990 to 2019.  Now the folk from those days are more affluent and realise they want the quality of oak.