Furniture. What would we do without it? Sit on the floor most likely. Whoever invented furniture did mankind a great service. And it has so many uses.

For starters, there's the furniture we use for our work. There are more kinds of furniture for work purposes than we probably need. But then again, maybe we do.

Take your standard desk. Well, maybe not so standard. There are many kinds of desks. Desks with drawers, desks without drawers, which are primarily made simply to keep stuff on. What kind of stuff? All kinds. Printers, computers, fax machines, telephones, and the list goes on and on. Of course desks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There are rectangular desks, square desks, oval or circular desks which are used mostly for those company meetings. There are big desks that can span half a room and small desks that can fit in the corner. Then of course your have your L shaped desks so that you and a co worker can work together without getting in each other's way.

Of course no office furniture would be complete without chairs. There are plenty of those to choose from as well, some more comfortable than others. You've got your hard chairs with absolutely NO padding whatsoever. Basically they're a couple of legs, hard wooden seat and hard wooden back. Kind of like the chairs your school teacher would put you in and stick you in a corner with when you were bad. But then there are the really NICE office chairs. You know the ones I mean. They have steel tripod supports, leather seat and back, swivel around and so comfortable you could fall asleep in them. Somewhere in between you have your felt foam seat chairs with felt foam backs. They're not as comfortable but you can sit in them for an 8 hour day.

Then you have your carts. These are mostly used for your Mr. Coffee that sits in the corner of the room so that you can get your caffeine fix when you need it. No office would be complete without a cart of some kind. The good thing about them is that they're small enough not to get in the way and big enough to do the job.

Then of course there are the filing cabinets. Have you ever seen an office that didn't have a filing cabinet? These also come in all shapes and sizes. There are the long cabinets usually used for storing irregularly shaped and large documents. Then there are your standard filing cabinets for storing manila folders. Most of these come with special racks inside so you can hang your documents up and not have to worry about them falling all over the place.

Yes, there is a ton of office furniture to choose from and based on the kind of office you have and the kind of decor you want to display to your workers will determine to a great extent what kind of furniture you get.

In the next article we'll go over furniture for your home.

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Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Furniture
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