Furniture Assembly & Storage in Raleigh, NC

Flat-pack meets an old house

Raleigh has the widest range of housing on our list, and furniture assembly is one of the places where that range makes an unexpected difference.

Flat-pack furniture is designed with two assumptions built in: the floor is flat and level, and the wall is plumb. In North Raleigh and Brier Creek both are broadly true. Inside the beltline, in Oakwood, Five Points, Hayes Barton and through much of the older ring, neither is.

Why the floor matters so much

A flat-pack carcass gets its squareness from being assembled square and then staying that way. Stand it on a floor that falls away in one direction and the whole box leans and, worse, twists.

Once it is racked:

Doors will not line up. The gaps around them go uneven, one corner touches before the other, and no amount of hinge adjustment fixes it, because the opening the door is sitting in is no longer rectangular.

Doors swing on their own. A wardrobe leaning back has doors that fall closed; leaning forward and they drift open.

Drawers bind or run out. A drawer runs in a rectangular opening. If the opening is a parallelogram, the drawer catches on one side.

Joints loosen. The back panel and the cam fixings are carrying a twist they were not designed for.

People blame the furniture. The furniture is usually fine.

Doing it properly

Check the base with a level before anything is built on it. On an older Raleigh floor there may be a noticeable fall across the width of a wardrobe.

Pack the base with shims until it is level in both directions and the carcass is square. The shims disappear behind the plinth or the base trim.

Check for twist as well as level. A floor can be level front to back and still have one corner low. Checking diagonally catches it.

Then build up from a square base, and the doors and drawers fit the way they were designed to.

It adds a small amount of time to an assembly and it is the difference between a unit that works and one that never quite does.

The wall

Old walls lean and bow, and pushing a unit tight against one means either the top or the base is standing off it.

The unit gets set plumb, and the gap behind is accepted rather than the unit being forced to follow the wall.

Where the gap shows, a scribe or a filler piece closes it. Where the item is against a wall with a skirting, the base may need notching to sit back properly — worth doing rather than leaving a unit standing an inch proud.

Anti-tip fixings still matter, and in an older house the wall may be plaster over lath. The strap fixes into the studs behind, because plaster will not carry a falling wardrobe — it holds because it keyed through the lath and an anchor in the plaster field will simply pull out.

Getting it into the room

Older houses have narrower doorways, tighter turns and stairs that were built before anyone owned a king-sized bed.

Large items get built in the room they will stand in. A built carcass has corners that mark casings and stair walls, and carrying one round a turn twists it, which is exactly the problem described above.

Measure the route in advance for anything that arrives assembled. The narrowest point is usually the turn at the top or bottom of the stairs rather than the doorway.

Storage in older houses

Closets are small. Houses of this period were built for far fewer clothes than anyone owns now, and closet systems that assume a standard modern opening frequently do not fit.

Building to the actual opening — shelves and hanging rails on cleats fixed into the framing, cut to the space rather than to a kit — is usually the better answer, and it uses the whole of a small closet rather than most of it.

Basements and attics in older houses are damp-prone. Particleboard shelving in a damp space swells and delaminates within a couple of years. Timber or metal is the sensible choice there.

The newer neighbourhoods

North Raleigh and Brier Creek are the easy case: flat floors, plumb walls, regular framing, and the usual list of wardrobes, closet systems and garage shelving.

Garage storage is the common one, and the rules are simple: wall shelving fixes into framing, freestanding racking gets packed level because garage floors slope to the door by design, and overhead racks hang from the ceiling structure — where that is trusses, the loads and fixing positions have to suit them rather than being improvised.

Getting a price

Tell us what the items are, how many, and which rooms. For an older house, mention if the room is upstairs and whether the floor is noticeably out — that changes the time rather than the approach.

Raleigh is about half an hour from us, with no travel surcharge.