Selling Home Furnishings: A Training Program

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Unit V
FURNITURE WOODS—THEIR ORIGIN AND USE

• Value and Price in Relation to Home Furnishings.
• Principal Furniture Woods.
• Making the Most of Wood Structure and Its Appeal to the Eye.
• Importance of Craftsmanship.

Unit V.—FURNITURE WOODS—THEIR ORIGIN AND USE

VALUE AND PRICE IN RELATION TO HOME FURNISHINGS

The materials in a piece of furniture, and the way those materials are put together, affect not only its appearance, but also its durability and behavior in service. Appearance and durability both help to determine value. They are factors which usually influence a customer toward or against a purchase. But the customer, unaided, cannot be expected to see and appreciate these factors at their true importance. Therefore a sound knowledge of materials and construction, plus ability to use that knowledge effectively, is essential to the salesperson who wants to take the road to higher earnings.

Every sale is a process of weighing one satisfaction against another. Those who buy from sheer necessity compare price against price, or price against terms. Those who buy for any other reason weigh price against value.

Do not forget that price and value are by no means the same thing. A low price does not automatically constitute, from the customer's viewpoint, a high value. The price of an article is fixed by the dealer. The value of that article is fixed by the buyer, since it depends, not upon what the article costs to make or what is asked for it, but upon what it is worth to her.

Except for the confirmed bargain hunter, no buyer will buy anything, at any price, unless she believes that it will add to her satisfactions. On the other hand, few persons will buy anything, however satisfactory, unless they believe it to be worth the price. It follows, as a fundamental rule of salesmanship that price is almost never the first consideration in the mind of the buyer, but that it is almost always the second consideration. For this reason, few sales can be completed without a demonstration of value.

YOUR OWN BUYING HABITS

Study your own buying habits, and you will see that you seldom make a purchase on the basis of price alone. Always you consider value. Consciously or otherwise, you compare the satisfaction you hope to gain against the price you are asked to pay. You like a bargain, but you recognize that low price, by itself, does not constitute a bargain.

TWO STAGES IN SELLING

The buying habits of the great majority of your customers are no different than your own. People generally will not buy a piece of furniture at any price unless they first believe, of their own initiative or as the result of your efforts, that it will afford them satisfaction, for their own use. Having found such a piece, they still will refuse to buy it until they also become convinced that its value measured in terms of their own satisfactions, equals or exceeds the price.

Thus the average sale consists of two stages:

A prevalent fault among even experienced furniture salespersons is the failure to deal adequately with the first stage—that of finding out what the customer wants. With interior decorators and many drapery salespersons the second stage—demonstration of value—is more often neglected. Moreover, much business is lost by men who reverse the logical process, and begin their demonstration of the value of an article before their customer has tentatively accepted it as adapted to her own needs and tastes.

On the other hand, innumerable sales are sacrificed through reliance upon mere assertion of value, or upon discounts or marked-down prices, with a consequent failure to deliver, at the end, a convincing demonstration of value. In such a demonstration construction and materials will occupy the spotlight.

CONSTRUCTION LESS INTERESTING TO WOMEN THAN MATERIALS

American women are not too much interested, as a rule, in the construction of the articles they buy. This is not because they regard sound construction as unimportant, but because they have been taught to take it more or less for granted. Their chief concern in any product lies in what it will do for them, and they do not care a great deal about how that result is insured. An analysis of magazine advertising will reveal the fact that construction is rarely used as an advertising appeal; a count of several current issues indicates about 1 case in 20.

There is a much wider interest in materials, including furniture woods and the floor covering, drapery, and upholstery fabrics; though even here the primary concern of the great majority of buyers is with the effect of these materials upon their homes and themselves rather than with the materials as such. According to an industry survey, 6 women out of 100 have no interest in furniture; 61 are interested in it primarily as a means of making their homes more attractive; 16 are chiefly interested in furniture woods; 14 in style or appearance; and 3 in construction.

HOW THIS ATTITUDE OF MIND AFFECTS OUR INTERESTS

The widespread disposition of women to take construction and materials for granted tends to reduce emphasis upon quality, forces prices toward unnecessarily low levels, and cuts down volume and profits. It encourages the production of poor merchandise, thereby undermining public confidence in furniture and furniture dealers.

A sound knowledge both of materials and of construction will help demonstrate the superior value of more costly merchandise when such merchandise lies within the customer's buying power. This knowledge, properly used, will of course enable sales to be speeded up, a larger number of customers to be waited on, and a larger percentage of sales to be made. Even when the salesman is emphasizing woods and fabrics, the materials of which home furnishings are made, he must win the customer's confidence in the quality of construction, the craftsmanship with which these materials are put together, if he would effectively minimize what to him is price resistance.

PRINCIPAL FURNITURE WOODS

In all periods of high civilization men have felt a deep interest in the furniture woods. The sheer beauty of these woods, their association in sentiment and legend with the noble trees of many lands, their never-ending, never-repeating variations of figure and shading, the romantic stories of their journeyings by ship or caravan from the far ends of the earth—these things always have delighted men and women of taste.

Undoubtedly they who sell furniture know too little about the furniture woods, talk too little about them, make far too little use of their powerful appeal to the eye and the emotions. If they can learn to know them intimately, and to regard them, not as merchandise merely, but as something fine and nobly beautiful, they cannot fail to inspire widespread admiration and desire for ownership.

A LIST OF THE LEADING FURNITURE WOODS

In appendix D, page 255, will be found a brief account of leading furniture woods. Most of these woods are used today, and many of them will be found in your stock. Ours is an age which takes great delight in colorful and beautifully figured woods. An astonishing variety of new species has come into comparatively recent use as the result of exploration in Africa, Australia, and the more remote and difficult areas of Central and South America. Salespersons are strongly urged, through this and other sources, to become familiar with the leading furniture woods in order to possess the background necessary to arouse appreciation of the beauty, distinction, and rarity of the woods used in furniture manufacture and to convey an adequate sense of the time, skill, and expense necessary to make these lovely woods available in strong and enduring form for the modern home.

MAKING THE MOST OF WOOD STRUCTURE AND ITS APPEAL TO THE EYE

As is well known, trees grow in diameter by the addition of new layers of wood, one of which forms just under the bark each year during the life of the tree. If growth is rapid, these layers, which are known as annual rings, will be relatively thick; if slow, they will be thin. In warm climates the growth of many trees is almost continuous, the fiber relatively uniform, and the annual rings very slightly marked. In cold climates growth is rapid in spring and summer, but almost ceases in winter, and the annual rings are sharply marked. The wood produced first in each year is frequently different from that produced later in the year, so that a distinction is drawn between the early springwood and the later summerwood. In such cases a cross section of the tree trunk will show a number of concentric annual rings whose number is equal to the age of the region of trunk cut. In certain kinds of trees, for instance, species of pines and leaf-shedding oaks, after the wood has attained a certain age, it darkens in color, so that when a crosscut of a 100-year-old part of the trunk is taken, the darker older central wood contrasts as heartwood with the surrounding pale sapwood.

All hardwoods contain a multitude of long continuous water-conducting tubes termed wood vessels; in cross section they are often visible to the naked eye as pores. In woods like oak and ash these pores are easily visible in cross section as minute holes, and in longitudinal section as fine grooves, which are often accentuated by furniture makers through treatment with a dark filler. In woods like maple and gum the pores are too small to be seen without a microscope.

Oak, chestnut, ash, and elm are conspicuous members of the ring-porous group of hardwoods, so called because one or more rows of large pores are formed at the beginning of each annual ring. Walnut and mahogany are diffuse-porous because the pores, though plainly visible, are more nearly uniform in size throughout the annual rings.

In addition to the annual rings and pores, traversing the wood at right angles to the fibers are thin stringlike structures that run from the outside of the wood radially inward toward the pith. In some woods these rays are too minute to play a part in the visible figure of the wood, while in others, notably the oak, they are conspicuous, and in quarter-sawed boards produce the effect known as silver grain or flake. These are the medullary rays. For more detailed information about wood structure, consult any reliable encyclopedia.

These variations in structure, plus variations in coloring, constitute the physical basis for the innumerable charming effects which expert wood workers are able to create for the furniture lover. Some of these effects can be produced in solid wood; others in veneer only. They result from four general methods of cutting:

The interest of furniture buyers lies in the beauty, durability, romantic appeal and prestige value of the various woods, and not in the technical processes by which their individuality and fine qualities are brought out. However, a few facts concerning the various types of figures are here set down for possible emergency use.

VENEER AND PLYWOOD

"The art of producing and using veneers dates back to the earliest days of civilization," says the Encyclopedia Britannica.[13]

Although we do not know when and where the art of veneering was invented, there is no doubt that it had reached a high development in Egypt 3,500 years ago. It was practiced by the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, by the Greeks, and particularly by the Romans, who used it not only in furniture-making but also in door frames and panels. There is a record that Cicero, celebrated Roman orator, paid for a veneered table of citrus wood a sum equivalent to $20,000 in gold.

When the ancient European civilization gave way to the Dark Ages, the art of veneering was temporarily lost, only to be revived in the form of inlays during the Renaissance. True veneering did not become common in Europe until after the middle of the seventeenth century, when a new type of saw was invented which would divide a plank into thin sheets. As an early result of the discovery of the New World and the sea route to India and the East, many rare and exotic woods were carried to Spain, Holland, France, and England and used as veneers and inlays in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—among them mahogany, satinwood, amboyna, kingwood, rosewood, tulipwood, amaranth, harewood, and vermillion. The art of veneering reached the point of technical perfection during the reign of Louis XIV, and ever since that time it has been practiced by most of the great cabinetmakers in all countries; except of course, in the case of the carvers, of whom Chippendale is the outstanding example. Most of the magnificent furniture of France, that of the Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Adam styles in England, and the really distinguished furniture of the late Colonial and Federal periods in America, made a free use of veneers.

The whole process of making veneers, from the selection of a tree in some far corner of the globe to the finished plywood, is a long and exacting one which demands the technical knowledge of scientists, engineers, and chemists as well as the taste of the artist.

Briefly, we can say that the logs must be transported, studied carefully in order to determine just how to secure the most beautiful effects from the wood, usually soaked or conditioned to soften the fiber, and sliced or sawed into sheets of veneer, which are afterward dried carefully. This is a work for specialists, and is usually done at established veneer mills. At the furniture factory the sheets must again be carefully studied, matched, clipped, taped, glued, and built under a pressure of 200 to 300 pounds into the finished plyboards.

A single tree may yield 500 board feet of lumber or the same number of surface feet 1 inch thick. Cut into thin face veneers this same tree would yield 10,000 square feet or 20 times as much in terms of surface area.[14]

ADVANTAGES OF PLYWOOD

Technically, plywood is the product resulting from three or more layers of veneers joined with glue, and usually laid with the grain of adjoining plies at right angles. Almost always an odd number of plies are used to secure balanced construction. The outside plies are called faces, or face and back. The center ply is called the core, and intervening plies, laid at right angles to the others, are called cross bands. Plywood is a device for combining lightness and great strength with freedom from the tendency to warp and split.

Modern engineering, chemistry, and machinery have brought the production of plywood to a point of perfection where it is as strong, weight for weight, as steel. It is wood engineered for beauty, strength, and economical application. Its peculiar excellence, as contrasted with solid wood, results from equalizing the normal internal stresses of the wood by running alternate layers in different directions. In standard five-ply construction, widely used for good furniture, the two outer and the middle ply, or core, have the grain running in the same direction, while the second and fourth plies, or cross bands, have the grain running at right angles to that of the others. Plywood was produced by the Chinese thousands of years ago, and is found in the furniture of the ancient Egyptians. Yet it has taken modern ingenuity plus engineering and chemical skill to develop a product capable of meeting the large scale but exacting requirements of today—a product now used on land, in the air, and on the seas. Plywood was not produced by machinery, and in commercial quantities, until about 50 years ago, when plywood factories were started in Russia. Ninety percent of all wood furniture manufactured today is of veneer and plywood construction. It is used in the interest of economy, strength, flatness, and beauty, not only in cabinet and furniture making but also in residence and office building, coach-building and various engineering industries, including aviation. Plywood offers maximum strength in all directions combined with minimum weight.

BOTH SOLID AND VENEER AVAILABLE IN WOOD FURNITURE

Some persons adamantly insist that to be truly good quality, furniture must be solid, built wholly of one wood. While many experts insist that this view is untenable, those who insist upon it should, of course, buy solid pieces. To do so will frequently involve denying themselves the full beauty of the fine graining which normally can be had only in veneer. The salesman and the industry should jointly educate the customer that good veneer is not only with us to stay, but is used in some of the best furniture made anywhere in the world and that good American veneer has lasting qualities in addition to its value in bringing to the average home graining and finish that can never be obtained in furniture made from solid wood.

SELLING VENEERS WITHIN PRICE RANGES

The price range of veneer varies directly with the ready availability of the species, its color and figure, and its working and finishing qualities. Some veneers cost 20 times as much as others, and certain of the rarest and most beautifully figured sheets are literally worth their weight in silver. Well known commonly used species may be either high priced or inexpensive, depending upon the desirability and current demands for that figure.

To illustrate, American walnut may vary exceedingly in price. Taking the cost of the finest burl as 100 percent, crotch walnut might cost 57 percent as much; stump wood and figured long wood, 30 percent; and plain long wood approximately 5 percent. These percentages represent only the finest of each of these particular figures.

Therefore, instead of calling a suite "walnut" as if that is all there is to be said, it would be wise to point out that it is made of a particularly desirable piece of walnut, both rare and costly because of its fine figure and color. The same type of reasoning may be used in speaking of mahogany, maple, oak, and other beautifully figured cabinet woods.

IMPORTANCE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP

Furniture making is one of the oldest of human industries. For thousands of years it remained a craft industry. The transition to a machine industry began about 100 years ago. Since then, and especially within recent years, the use of machinery has been developed to a point of extraordinary efficiency. It is this fact alone which makes good furniture so low in price today. Indeed, were it not for the machine, most persons would have little furniture, and that of the crudest kind.

And yet it would be inaccurate to think of furniture as an impersonal, machine-made product; craftsmanship is still basically important in furniture making, and will remain so always. From 50 to 60 different and highly specialized machines are used in a modern factory making desks, chairs, and tables, and these machines perform all purely mechanical operations with amazing speed and more than human accuracy. Yet at every stage, from the selection of the woods to the final touches in the finishing room, the taste and accumulated skill of expert craftsmen are imperative. In the making of upholstered and reed furniture, machinery plays a subordinate part, and the skill of the craftsman is and always will be the dominant factor.

QUALITY OFTEN CONCEALED

Furniture making employs many materials and many processes. In every one of these materials and processes there are wide differences in excellence between the worst and the best. All of these differences are accurately known only to the manufacturer because they are concealed in the finished product. Many of them are known to the expert salesman. Few are known to the consumer who buys furniture too infrequently to become informed on concealed values, and naturally is disposed to base a judgment of value on the two obvious factors—eye appeal and price. As a result sales volume, to say nothing of public appreciation of furniture, is unnecessarily low.

MODERN FACTORIES BUILD CONCEALED VALUES INTO MANY PRODUCTS

It is obvious that all the operations of preparing wood, routing it through the factory, synchronizing the many processes, and eliminating waste can be performed most efficiently and economically in a modern plant and under the control of scientific knowledge and engineering skill. Factories so operated, therefore, may build into their product concealed or special values which are passed to the consumer in the form of lower price, quality for quality. These concealed values actually may take several forms; they may be concerned with materials and processes, or with construction and design. Although their service value is readily understood, their actual presence in any particular piece of furniture is not so easily determined by the inexperienced salesperson or the infrequent purchaser.

USE OF WOOD FREE FROM DEFECTS

When wood reaches the factory from the sawmill in the form of dimension lumber it contains some imperfections, among them rotted or discolored heartwood, stained sapwood, season checks, splits, knots, worm and grub holes, and decayed tissue. The more or less complete rejection of all defective lumber naturally affects production costs, and the use of perfect lumber in the unexposed parts of a piece of furniture constitutes a concealed value.

USE OF WOOD WITH CORRECT MOISTURE CONTENT

In wet lumber, wood cells will contain moisture in amounts ranging from 30 to 100 percent of the weight of the woody fiber itself. If a considerable percentage of this moisture is permitted to remain in the pieces which are used for building furniture, a disastrous shrinkage will result. Kiln drying the wood to secure the ideal moisture content and to free it from internal stresses requires time, expense, and great skill. Construction cost can be reduced by slighting the process. Accordingly, perfectly conditioned wood constitutes a highly important concealed value in good furniture.

CHAIRS, TABLES, AND CASE GOODS HAVE CONCEALED VALUES

The points of concealed value in chair and table construction include, among others:

Important points concerning the legs, tops, and end panels of cases are substantially the same as for chairs and tables. Standard five-ply for the tops of cases and standard three-ply for the end panels is the usual but not the universal practice. Other points include:

UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE

Here the construction is almost completely concealed. The customer sees only the exposed portion of the frame and the covering and, except in the case of advertised goods, knows no more about the construction and concealed values of a piece than is told her by the salesperson.

Years ago much upholstered furniture was imported from a famous factory in London. It was costly, but vastly comfortable and of great durability. Yet when a piece was "taken down" it was found to contain far fewer springs, tied with fewer knots, than was the case with American goods of the same general price range. This indicates the folly, in the case of upholstered furniture, of setting up measures of excellence based upon exactly standardized practice. What applies to plywood or dowel joints does not necessarily apply to spring construction.

CONCEALED VALUES IN UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE

In general, the points of concealed value in upholstered furniture include:

REED FURNITURE

In the book Tropical Nature, A. R. Wallace, after describing the great trees of the tropical forest, says: "Next to the trees themselves the most conspicuous feature of the tropical forests is the profusion of woody creepers and climbers that everywhere meet the eye * * *. They twist in great serpentine coils or lie entangled in masses on the ground."

In such a forest grows Calamus, the rattan palm, whose slender stem often attains the enormous length of 600 feet. From Calamus is obtained the basic material employed in making reed furniture. It comes from the tropical forests of the East Indies after it has been passed through several primitive processes by native workers. In this country it is prepared in the forms of cane, rattan, and reed for weaving; maple frames are designed and built; the weaving is done by American craftsmen.

Points of excellence include skillful preparation of the raw materials; sturdy construction of the frames, including bracing; and skill in weaving. Unhurried work means better construction but higher cost, and is thus an element of value.

THE APPEAL OF FINISH

The appeal of finish is so potent as to require little demonstration. Most customers are quite willing to accept wood finish, as they accept dyestuffs or rayon, as one of the mysteries of chemical science. The results speak for themselves. No one thinks the less of an old Cremona violin because the secret of its varnish is known.

The story of modern chemistry is in fact more romantic than all the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, yet people generally speaking cannot be stirred by it. Tell them how the old craftsmen of Gothic Europe, hundreds of years ago, stained oak planks a beautiful rich brown by burying them for weeks or months under manure and you will interest them deeply. Tell them how American craftsmen, a generation ago, got the same results with the fumes of ammonia and a leaden vault and you will barely hold their interest. Tell them how other craftsmen today squirt a preparation of coal tar and water from one spray gun, and a preparation of wood pulp or old rags from another to finish fine furniture, and they will probably cancel the order.

In the late sixteenth century, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and other cabinetmakers employed a process of staining, or rather of softly bleaching fine woods through the action of decomposing salts of chromium, followed by French polishing with oils and waxes. True varnish, a solution of resins in hot oils, was discovered in America in the middle nineteenth century, and achieved an immense popularity. Modern lacquer, which is totally unlike the Oriental lacquer, is a twentieth century discovery which combines gun cotton (nitrocellulose) with butyl alcohol, a byproduct in the manufacture of acetone.

WOOD FINISHING

The salesperson should learn that honest construction and careful finishing of a piece of furniture often count for more than the kind of wood used. Beautiful wood, however desirable it may be, is never the chief source of value. No piece of furniture is really completed until it has been given an appropriate and artistic finish.

What May Be Expected of a Finish.

There are at least three characteristics of a good wood finish.

Beauty of finish depends to a great extent upon knowledge of how a surface should be prepared and the skill which is used in carrying out approved practices. The workman who understands the structure of wood, its mechanical and chemical properties, and has the right tools and equipment for preparing the surface, is not likely to use poor methods. He will understand that great care is required to produce a smooth surface on a piece of wood; that coarser defects of an improperly finished surface under the microscope reveal undreamed-of roughness on a carelessly scraped or inadequately sanded piece of wood. Also he will know that for permanence of finish and lasting qualities of construction, the wood must be properly seasoned and remain in a proper shop-dry condition during the entire construction and finishing periods.

Reasons for Staining.

Wood in its natural tones does not usually harmonize with textiles and wall colors.

The coloring often brings out unsuspected qualities and beauty in the wood itself, due to—

Greater durability may be obtained through use of preservative stains.

Classification of Wood Stains.

There are four classes of stains, named according to the solvents used in making them:

Two other classes of so-called stains are known as varnish stains and wax stains. These stains are not transparent as they obscure the grain and leave a layer of pigment on the surface.

These four classes of stains may be subdivided into two classes, acid and alkaline, depending upon their chemical reaction with other substances. Water-soluble stains, most largely used, are often made of coal tar dyes, which dissolve in water, and can be used in an acid bath. They are obtained from color substances having no body, such as walnut juice, logwood extract, turmeric, the juice of berries, and the bark of trees.

Stains are applied by brushing, wiping, spraying, and dipping, the latter on quantity production of cheaper grades. Because hardwoods absorb stains more slowly than softwoods, the advantages of the first three methods are apparent. Where this strong contrast between sapwood and heartwood exists, the salesperson should know the sapwood requires more stain than the remainder of the wood. A coat of stain may be applied to the light streaks and after it dries, the entire surface may be stained.

Aside from color there are "polished" and "dull" finishes. Varnish is the original finishing medium, serving as a protective agent and as a means of building up a high finish. For wood finishing the varnish is transparent, but for other uses is sometimes colored, as in black varnish or japan, or by the addition of dyestuffs, as in lacquers.

Lacquers permitting a polish finish are replacing gum varnish finishes to a great extent because lacquer dries in about one-tenth the time required for varnishes, and because lacquer finishes wear well under exposure or use. Chemical action ceases in lacquer films after they harden.

Fuming.

Fuming wood means subjecting the wood to the fumes of ammonia of full strength (specific gravity 880). The process really comes under the head of chemical staining. It is particularly well adapted to the treatment of oak for it brings out in varying shades of brown the rugged quality of this wood. It is penetrating; it does not fade. After the oak has been fumed, a coat of raw linseed oil will have a pleasant darkening effect upon the wood. Age only serves to darken and beautify the result.

Enameling.

Enameling differs from ordinary varnishing in that the material used is opaque. For this reason it is folly to use it over expensive woods. Enamel has the brittleness of a piano varnish and the brilliancy that is given by a hard resinous gum. Maple, birch, pine, and poplar are well adapted to this treatment, which if it has been applied carefully and in accordance with approved methods, will yield all the luster and softness of a high grade varnish. Manufacturers have met the demands for several surface effects or types of finish by producing enamels having high gloss, eggshell gloss, and flat or dull effects. The tinting of enamels is accomplished by mixing the proper amounts of colors which are ground either in japan, oil, or special enamel-varnish with the best process zinc-white. More recently other materials, such as lithopone (barium sulphate) and zinc oxide are used in many of the cheaper enamels. The decorative possibilities of stencils and transfers are almost unlimited when used upon common woods and metals finished with good enamel. This accounts for the rising demand for breakfast room furniture, sun parlor furniture, porch furniture, and many steel, plastic, and wooden novelties in bright designs using two or three colors.

BLOND FURNITURE WOODS

The so-called blond woods are of two types—bleached, consisting of normally brunette woods which have been artificially lightened, and the unbleached woods, which have a naturally light color. They run the gamut of shades and colors from white through eggshell, cream, straw, sand, beige, and yellow to tan and light brown.

Among the bleached woods, blond walnut and blond mahogany are probably the most used. This is true partially because of their wide acceptance as desirable cabinet woods, and partially because of a type of beauty of natural grains which is brought out effectively by the blond treatment.

The unbleached blond woods include not only maple, light oak, aspen, and birch, but also a wide variety of such exotic and unusual woods as satinwood, myrtle burl, zebrawood, lacewood, holly, harewood, and avodire, to mention only a few.

The blond treatment employs a transparent rubbed finish which is effective in bringing out the natural pattern of the grain. English harewood, one of the most distinctive, owes its beautiful silver grey to a dye which is used on the light yellow natural color of harewood (sycamore). Maple attains its warm reddish brown color also by staining. Some most striking and beautiful effects in today's furniture are achieved by using blond woods in combination with trimming of dark woods.

The use of blond treatment has resulted in the creation of light, airy effects which tend to brighten the room in which it is used. While the present trend is toward its widest acceptance for bedroom and boudoir use, it is being used for the living room, dining room, and occasional pieces.

Consult Reference Books Freely.

Volumes have been written about the furniture woods and wood-finishing. From the great fund of information available, selection has been made of material describing the most common process of wood finishing. Those who desire to make exhaustive or more searching study of this subject will do well to consult such books as have been listed on page 103 of the Suggested Reading List.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What factors determine selection and use of any particular wood for a given purpose?

2. If a plain style table having a flat top and four legs were advertised as "Combination Mahogany" from what would you believe that table was made?

3. What are the essential differences between the Classic-Modern development and the Functional-Modern development?

4. How should you answer a customer who held the view that there was something shoddy and false about veneer?

5. What are the "concealed values" in a large upholstered chair? How may they best be discussed with your customer?

6. Explain the following:

• Kiln drying.
• Sapwood.
• Hardwood.
• Burls.
• Quarter-sawing.
• Moisture content.
• Tenon.
• Calamus.
• Heartwood.
• Plywood.

7. What are points of excellence in finishing?

8. Are you familiar with the important facts in connection with the manufacture of your furniture woods?

• Location of the factories.
• Sources of the principal furniture woods.
• Reasons for use of each wood in certain situations.
• Workmanship employed.
• Inspection and testing methods.
• Standards maintained.

9. What are the so-called real cabinet woods?

10. If your customer determines to use painted furniture for his living room set does it make any difference whether the manufacturer has used an inexpensive furniture wood?

SUGGESTED READING LIST