How to Choose and Use Your Buffet Table

If you are thinking of buying one, you have to know what to look for.

What are the other uses for your buffet?

Transform your buffet table from a simple table into something more useful. To get the most out of your buffet, you need to know how to utilize it at its fullest.

If you are saving up on space, then you may use your buffet as the dining table. You can transform this table as a party table, too. You can also use it as a storage area for your dinnerware, glassware, china, and silver ware.

As a party table

• This table may serve as the main dining table when guests are around. This is where they can gather and sit to eat. Just provide seats to accommodate all your guests. If your buffet is very spacious, you can lay out the food together with the dinnerware, utensils, glassware for each visitor.


• If you are not holding a sit down party, you can use your buffet as the service table where all the food and drinks are laid out. This will allow your guests to move around, socialize, and chat with other guests. Your guests can also pick the food they want to eat easily.

You can still use the buffet for intimate dinners. If you opt not to use it as a dining table, you may use it as accent furniture instead. Drape it with a tablecloth and put decorations on top. You can put design plates, figurines, flower arrangement and pictures on the buffet table as decorations. For a more romantic appeal, you can put scented candles on the buffet table and play soft music to complement the mood.

As storage furniture

• To have more use of your buffet, choose to buy one that has a lot of storage units such as doors, shelves and drawers. This will allow you to store your dinnerware, silverware, china, glassware, utensils, napkins, tablecloth and other dining items. If your buffet table has an open space or its doors are made of glass, you can arrange the items in such a way that they would appear as display items.

Features to look for:

The Size

The size will normally depend on the size of your dining room. You also need to base your choice on the number of people whom you normally invite over for dinner. Buy chairs, which will match your buffet. You can opt to buy foldable furniture that is easy to store and saves up on space.

The Material

There are different materials used for buffet tables. Wood will match traditional and grand homes. Metal and glass are for modern homes, which look elegant as well.

A buffet table will surely improve the party experience of your guests. This will make dining more flexible. You will also find this furniture to be multifunctional for your dining room.

So if you are looking for you own buffet table, make sure to list down your specifications. This will help you to make a good decision. Visit lafurniturestore.com for different designs and styles of buffet and other furniture. They likewise have a broad selection of other furniture for the home.

How to Choose the Right TV Bed

The first thing to consider when looking to purchase a TV bed is to ensure that you consider the visual implications of buying one. Whilst many of these types of product are extremely stylish, you might find that there isn't a huge amount of variation available in terms of the colour schemes and the amount of potential designs that they can fit into. It would be well worth your time researching before buying to ensure that the right product will take its place seamlessly into the décor of the room in which you are attempting to install it. It's well worth the time.

Secondly is to ensure that you have budgeted accordingly for the substantial investment that you will make when you purchase one of the many leather TV beds that are available now from the many potential retailers. Whilst they can be obtained at much cheaper prices than you might initially expect - especially from the costs when they first appeared - these items of furniture will still cost a few hundred pounds, and the feature is in itself technically not an essential, especially if you already have a television in your room that does it's job perfectly well. Really consider about whether the purchase is essential before you splash the cash.

Another consideration is where you will actually make the final purchase, should you eventually decide on doing so. As a product that is becoming more common, finding a TV bed is not nearly as tricky as it might once have been. However, this does mean that there are many potential places where you can find one, and this means choosing. Ensure that the place you purchase from has a list of satisfied customers, and is able to offer proof of good quality products. There are plenty of website that offer reviews on situations such as these, so ensure that you do your research in advance, and you'll usually end up with a high quality product.

Finally, always make sure that you allow sufficient space in your bedroom for your leather TV beds to be installed. You'd be surprised how many people we've seen that made a purchase of one of the large double TV beds available without really considering whether their bedroom would actually suit the product at all - this normally led to a very cramped up room! As with all areas of interior design: measure up in advance, or you could end up with a bit of a problem.

What Is Wrong With Using Wood Furniture Vs Bamboo Furniture?

What is wrong with using wood furniture? Nothing, if you do not care about how we can sustain the consumption of earth wood resources. As a starter, the world as we know it is losing its forests fast. This is causing environmental decline and extreme difficulty to secure resources for wood furniture.

On September 1, 2011 German Prime Minister Persson, who is also a member of World Resources Institute's board of directors, said "Restoring 150 million hectares of degraded lands represents an exciting and largely untapped opportunity to create more jobs and economic growth, while also protecting our climate." The Bonn Challenge builds on a New Global Assessment, a World Resources Institute's project, identifying that more than 2 billion hectares of the world's deforested and degraded lands are available for restoration. For further clarity, the earth land mass is about 14.9 billion Hectares (36.8 billion acres). So, more than 13.4% of the land on earth meets the criteria as recoverable from deforestation and degrading. The target of "The Bonn Challenge" is actually aiming at one percent of the earth land mass or 7.5% of the deforested land. There are four categories of forests depending on the latitude and climate, namely, tropical, subtropical, temperate, and taiga forests. During the last century, the world lost 20% of its forests. The remaining forests are evenly divided between tropical/subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/taiga forests in developed countries. According to Lester R. Brown, in his book, titled "Plan B 3.0 -Mobilizing to Save Civilization," the developing world has lost 13 million hectares of forest a year since 1990, an area roughly the size of Greece, and the developed world actually gained 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year during the same period. He went on to describe that this net loss is worse than it seems because of the loose classification of forestland. Only 40 percent of the world's remaining forest cover qualify as natural forest systems capable to support all of their biodiversity.

What are the reasons for the over deforestation? They are described in the following points:

• Firewood: developing countries in Africa, Haiti, Madagascar, etc. have a high demand for fuel and resort mostly to woods used as firewood, over half of the forest disappeared in exchange for fuel;


• Paper: this is still a major use of woods even though recycling in the developed world has reduced the overall consumption of wood for paper and even caused some paper mills to close but remains a major player of this arena;


• Lumber: construction and wood products still rely primarily on the forests, in the furniture area, China has taken the lead of wood products industry and has searched in the world for resources beyond Nigeria and the Philippines where the forests were exhausted, the recent exploited forests in Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia, and into the Amazon and the Congo Basin. Forest Trends, an NGO, predicted even those recent mother lodes won't last more than 20 years.


• Ranches and farms: Many developing countries like Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia exchanged forests for ranches raising cash producing animals and farms for commodity crops like palm oil for human consumption or diesel fuel, causing a term by Lester R. Brown, called "ecological/economic downward spiral" of no return.

Wood products include furniture, flooring, roofing, particle board, and other construction materials. Traditionally, we either stick with it or replace them with other materials like aluminum, cement, gypsum, plastics, etc. for many other good reasons. However, in furniture, bamboo is the only one that is organic and has been made from ancient times to the recent decade of "green" movement into environmentally sustainable bamboo furniture. The bamboo forests are also spread in all continents primarily in tropical and subtropical regions. They are already part of the eco-systems like the wood forests but they really belong to grass species, which mean they can grow right back after being cut from the stems. The world population continues to expand and the demand for furniture will continue to rise above the lagging supply by the wood furniture industry. Granted the developing countries will always strive to leap-frog and catch up with the developed countries because the latter seem to set the standards. How does our world connect with the rest of the world? One way is through the use of imported furniture, which is the rule than the exception in the last decade.

Needless to say, there is a long way to go before the furniture market is tipping over to bamboo. It is time however to make a personal statement in support of the "green" or environmental sustainability. Use more bamboo furniture than cutting down the last tree in the forest near you (you are lucky to find it).