When you choose to have home furniture customised

A customised set of chairs with a matching table.

About five years ago, Eric Makanga and his family, then residents of Bweyogerere, decided to have his living room sofa sets customised. As opposed to just walking to a furniture showroom to buy already made sofas, he explains: “We wanted to get something better and durable because sometimes when you buy finished sofa sets, you don’t know what material they might have used to make them. We thought having customised seats where you dictate on the kind of timber and cloth to use is better,” Makanga says.

Makanga recalls that buying all required materials like cushions, cloth, timber and the nails and all they needed and carried them home, where his carpenter worked tirelessly on the sofas.

“We called the carpenter to our home with his tools and he did everything from there. Whenever he needed anything to ease his work, I could just go and get it for him. It took him two weeks to complete all the work. I also shared with him the design and shape I wanted,” he recalls.

REASONS
The beauty of having customised sofas-sets, Makanga narrates, is that the carpenter assembles part by part of the sofas in the owner’s presence, where need be at their premises.

When there is surplus material that remains unused, he says the carpenter does not take it away. It is instead well kept by the owner for future use. “When your sofas are made from your home, the carpenter never cheats or uses material that can be easily penetrated by rats or cockroaches. If you ask him to use cushions or sponges or fibre to have soft seats, that’s what he will use,” he says.

With most, if not all furniture showrooms around and within Kampala, the sofa sets they showcase for sale in most cases can accommodate a limited number of people. Most of these are made with one long three seater and two single seaters. Sometimes, it is two double seaters and one single seater formats.
Such sofas, Makanga says, are made without considerations of the size of the room they will be put in.

“Before the carpenter started making the sofas, I was clear to him to make three double seaters for my living room. He first had to look at the size of the living room and take measurements so that the sofas could fit in with no much space left unused,” Makanga says, adding that he only had to pay for the carpenter’s labour and expertise.

COST IMPLICATION

When you buy your own sofa sets making material like timber and cushions, Bunjo says it is much cheaper compared to buying already made furniture, including payment for labour.

“In most cases, people who prefer having custom made furniture work around a tight budget. Before you spend on already made furniture, it is advisable to make some research and weigh the cost implications. Custom made sofas should not be looked at as being expensive. It instead should be something that you opt for that offers you value for money,” Bunjo says.

Recently, William Lule, a carpenter in Namanve, Wakiso district says that one would always find ready made dining tables and chairs while some clients with no time preferred to have their dining tables customised.

“When you find an already made dining table on display, chances are a capenter will tell you they are made from mvule, which might not be true. Since mvule is hard, you will pay up real fast but your prized possession will start cracking in a few days. Many clients feel cheated and have since then preferred having their dining tables customised,” Lule explains.

Depending on the place where one buys their tables from, Lule advises that most dining tables made out of muvule tree that come with six chairs costs not less than Shs1m. The costs usually range between Shs1m to Shs1.5m depending on the place where one chooses to buy them from.

“If you walk into a carpentry workshop and a carpenter offers to make you a dining table less than this amount, know that you are being cheated. Genuine muvule wood is hard to find which makes it costly because it offers you value for your money,” he advises, adding that the other costly type of wood good for making furniture is mahogany, which is also not so common on the furniture market.

UNIQUE COMPONENT

The idea of having your sofa sets customised is perhaps not new on the furniture market. However, the reasons for customising them defer from one person to another.

For Joel Wacha, a resident of Namugongo, who had his sofa sets customised in 2015, he explains that he simply wanted to have something unique.

“When you look around most furniture showrooms, you’ll find that some sofa sets have the same colour and cloth design. I had a cloth I wanted on my sofa sets and when I showed it to the carpenter, it came out exactly the way I wanted,” Wacha says, adding that this gave him an assurance that he was the only one with a unique cloth and design.

Abdullah Modi, a carpenter in Nsambya, one of the many furniture making places in Kampala, explains that when it concerns having custom made sofa sets, very many people have different
reasons.

“The clients that I sometimes receive, they always want sofas that do match with the curtains and the wall colour to make the living room uniform. Most of them come with photos of different colours and designs and when I look at it, i get a clear image of the kind of sofas they want,” Modi says, adding that the only disadvantage with custom made sofa sets is that sometimes it may take some time for a carpenter to deliver a client’s order when they already have pending work. This, he says is a major characteristic among clients who are impatient.

Similarly, there are those furniture buyers who prefer buying already made sofa sets. This, according to Joseph Bunjo, is dependent on the trust that one has with a carpenter as most of the first time furniture buyers always have friends or people who recommend them to different workshops.

Long-lasting
“When you choose to buy already made sofa sets, there are high chances they may not be as durable and strong as those that are custom made because carpenters use different materials. They could be nice looking on the outside but when you take them to your house, after a short time, they begin to wear out,” Bunjo says.

The main reasons he points out why already made sofa sets are in most cases not durable are that when carpenters do not mind about customer satisfaction and quality and use timber husks instead of cushions, all in the name of making quick money, such sofas easily get damaged by parasites like rats and cockroaches which are sometimes hard to eliminate.

“This is when you feel cheated as you will not have realised value for your money. There are high chances that you will end up throwing away your sofas within a short time,” Bunjo says.