Are you looking to furnish your bedroom? You have three main choices – standalone flat pack furniture (which may come as separate pieces or as a set package), fitted bedroom furniture and custom bedroom furniture. Choosing standalone bedroom furniture is pretty straightforward for most people – pick what you want, buy it, have it delivered to your home, get it assembled. While shopping for the flat pack may take a bit of effort, if you find that the furniture does not suit you it is possible to move it around or even get it returned. However, this is not the case with fitted bedroom furniture and custom bedroom furniture. These latter two types of furniture are a long-term commitment … almost like a marriage. You should put some thought in before making a firm decision. Once you have this kind of furniture installed in your bedroom, it is too late to say that you have buyer’s regret.

There are four main points to consider when comparing fitted bedroom furniture versus custom bedroom furniture:

• Availability
• Cost
• Looks
• Versatility

Availability

If you live in a mid-sized town, both types of furniture should be available to you. You may need to do search around, but the main issue is cost. If you live in a small town, your local bedroom furniture outlet may not have fitted bedroom furniture in stock. On the other hand, finding a good carpenter to build you custom bedroom furniture from scratch is usually not a problem. If you live in a city, it may not be possible to get affordable custom bedroom furniture. You may need to go to a high end bedroom furniture outlet.

If you want custom bespoke furniture, do not limit your thoughts to just wood. There are places where wood is not available cheaply, but steel is. A good welder and metalworker can do remarkable things with steel pipes and steel sheets. All you need to do after that is get rid of any sharp edges and paint it. There are many unemployed welders laid off from their factories when their companies shifted their manufacturing operations offshore.

Cost

Most people think that buying custom bedroom furniture is very expensive. However, this is not always true. When I was a child living in a small town, my family could afford custom-built fitted wardrobes but not the normal off-the-shelf furniture. The simple fact is that labor cost can be quite low in a small town. Custom-building furniture can be quite affordable if you have access to cheap but good quality wood and do not need a fancy design for your wardrobe and bed. It can be even cheaper if you mix and match your fitted wardrobe with good quality but “no brand name” bed and other small bedroom furniture built for sale by your local furniture workshop.

That’s pretty much what my parents did for my bedroom. The fitted wardrobe was custom-built of good quality wood and is still standing in its original form after two decades. But my bed changed with me as I grew up. In my teens, my father bought a study table from the local furniture workshop – it was built of solid but cheap wood with a veneer and had no brand name. It was a fairly popular item and the workshop built quite large numbers of these tables for their local customers. After my old bedroom was turned into a guest room, that table was temporarily used in my father’s new home office.

You may be wondering – shouldn’t mass-produced fitted bedroom furniture be cheaper? Unfortunately, no. Nowadays, with modern manufacturing techniques, the highest cost of making furniture comes from paying the company executives, renting/operating the furniture showrooms and branding/advertising. Making the furniture itself is no longer an expensive operation … not with the widespread use of cheap fibreboard, modern automation and/or offshore outsourcing to Third World nations.

Looks

With regards to custom bedroom furniture, if you have the cash, the only limits are your imagination. You may want to look at furniture magazines for inspiration. Professional bedroom furniture designers often have their exceptional designs published in trade magazines. Home decor magazines are quite popular and most libraries should have a good stock of them.

With fitted bedroom furniture, you have a limited menu of options. Mind you, some people still find the array of options quite overwhelming, but it is still a finite number. Just be aware that some options may need more time and may even cost extra. Check with your local bedroom furniture retailer before you commit.

Versatility

If you can afford it, nothing is more versatile than custom bedroom furniture. Do you have an odd-shaped bedroom? Do you need odd-shaped furniture? Is your ceiling an irregular height? If you answered yes to any of the preceding questions, standard fitted bedroom furniture packages may not be suitable.

That said, most modern homes (especially urban apartments) are built using a cookie-cutter design. You can almost always expect certain common shapes, themes and dimensions. That means a standard fitted bedroom furniture collection will work for most people.

So what should you choose – mass produced fitted bedroom furniture or bespoke custom bedroom furniture? As you can see from the discussion above, the two biggest issues for most people are the relative availability and cost of these two different options. If you live in a large city, you will probably by buying fitted bedroom furniture whether you like it or not. If you live in a mid-sized or smaller town and do not need branded furniture, your options are surprisingly much wider.