Tuesday, 30 September 2008

Dining Chairs - Pull Up a Seat and Enjoy a Good Meal

Dining chairs can go from the surprisingly cheap to the ridiculously expensive. Your only constraints may be your existing dining room furniture, your budget.... and perhaps your environmental conscience. Let me explain. Your dining chairs are an opportunity to choose furniture that is made from sustainable wood and with non-harmful products. Sustainable hardwoods like oak, cherry and maple make a good base, and even better when the production process excludes any chemicals that might vaporize overtime and pollute the air in your dining room.

Interestingly, if you have a dining room table that is not too outlandish, you'll probably find chairs to meet the criteria above and that still look good in your dining room. Sleek, contemporary designs using natural materials can go very well with glass top tables or tables made principally of metal. And of course, dining chairs can be both "green" and durable at the same time. No one says that you have to sit on chairs made out of cardboard or recycled soda pop bottles.

Naturally, if your budget extends to it, you can always partake in another form of recycling which is to buy antique chairs. Whether or not you choose to use them to seat your guests is another matter. It's true that purchasing those hand-built, eighteenth century master craftsman dining chairs makes you a little wary of using them for guests who might not appreciate their full value.

Another option is open to you as well. If your current set of dining chairs are looking a little worse for wear, then you can still get a little bit more useful life out of them by using seat covers. As seat covers can be relatively inexpensive, you can even treat yourself to "new" sets of chairs for every day of the week!

However, there comes a time when even the best recycling tips and tricks will no longer save a set of chairs whose time has come. It might be the right moment to overhaul the whole of your dining room furniture, from chairs to sideboard to table. Depending on what you have and what you want your dining room to look like, you may well find that a new ensemble of dining room furniture breathes a whole new life into the dining experience.

One of the basic choices that you will have to make in that case is whether to buy chairs with arms or without. It's a question of space, mobility and whether or not you and your guests at the dinner table would like to lounge around in your seats. Having arms on dining chairs also makes it easier to move the chairs around if you want to continue the conversation away from the table. On the other hand you would probably be well advised to acquire chairs for your dining room which do not require too much cleaning or maintenance, and that are protected against the stains that will inevitably result in area where food is commonplace.

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