Editorial Policy

Last updated: 10 September 2026

This site answers narrow, practical questions about solid wood furniture: what has gone wrong with a piece, which part fits it, which species is worth paying for, what will fit through the door, and what is worth buying. This page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to, including the ones we are still failing to meet.

What this site covers, and what it deliberately does not

The boundary is narrower than it looks, and it is a real one rather than a mission statement.

In scope: furniture made mostly of wood — dining tables, bed frames, dressers and nightstands, desks, bookcases and shelving, coffee and side tables. Repairing it, finding parts for it, understanding the species and construction it is made from, measuring it against your room, and choosing between the expensive version and the look-alike.

Out of scope, on purpose:

Woodworking and build-your-own plans. This is a site for people who own furniture, not people who make it. The moment a page starts telling you which router bit to buy, it has drifted somewhere we have no business being.
Upholstered and mechanical furniture — sofas, recliners, office and gaming chairs, mattresses. Almost nothing about them turns on the wood, and the questions readers ask about them are questions we are not equipped to answer well.
Anything that is only wood in the marketing. If the interesting part of a product is plastic, metal or foam, it belongs on some other site.

Narrow scope is the whole strategy. A site that answers forty furniture questions properly is worth more than one that answers four hundred badly, and it is far easier to tell when it is wrong.

The order we answer questions in

Pages on this site sit on a deliberate ladder, and the ladder starts at the cheapest outcome for you:

Fix — the piece is broken; here is the repair.
Part — the repair needs a component; here is the one that fits.
Wood — what the piece is made of, and whether that matters.
Size — whether it fits the room, the doorway, the person.
Dupe — the cheaper version of an expensive piece, and exactly where it is cheaper.
Buy — only at the end, once the earlier questions have been answered.

Where a piece can be repaired, the repair leads, even though a repair earns this site a fraction of what a replacement earns. A wobbling table is nearly always a joint that needs re-gluing. A drawer that sticks is nearly always a runner, not a chest of drawers. Saying so costs us money, and we would rather lose the sale than write the other page. The commercial side of that trade-off is set out in the Affiliate Disclosure.

Where the numbers come from

Furniture advice lives or dies on measurements. A wrong Janka rating, a wrong shelf clearance or a wrong slat thickness does not merely mislead — it wastes an afternoon, or a return shipment, or the price of a table.

So the rules on figures are strict:

We do not estimate. Dimensions, hardness ratings, board thicknesses, weight capacities and clearances come from the manufacturer’s published specification or from standard published references on wood properties. If we cannot find a figure, the page says the figure is unavailable rather than offering a plausible-sounding guess.
Ranges are given as ranges. Janka hardness varies within a species; “acacia” covers several timbers with genuinely different numbers. Where the honest answer is a spread, the page gives the spread instead of a false precision.
Derived numbers get checked by calculation, not by eye. Where a page presents a table we have worked out ourselves — coverage per litre, spacing across a span, how many boards for an area — the arithmetic is checked against the source figures before publication. Tables built by hand are where errors hide.
Units are given in both systems where a reader is likely to be working in either.

How products are chosen, and how they get rejected

A recommendation on this site has to survive a set of checks before it appears. These are the ones that actually reject candidates:

It has to be the thing the page is about. A search result is not evidence. Every product is confirmed against its own listing page rather than the search listing it came from, because search results for “acacia dining table” happily return tables made of mango.
“Wood” in the title is not enough. A listing can say wood in the heading and engineered wood in the bullet points. The bullets decide, not the title, and where a product turns out to be veneer or particleboard the page says so plainly instead of quietly dropping the word “solid”.
Colour and size variants are collapsed. One dining table routinely exists under six to twelve different listings — natural, walnut, espresso, rustic; 47 inch, 55 inch, 63 inch. Presenting those as separate recommendations would pad a list and tell you nothing, so they are treated as one product.
A product with no usable image, no listing history or no ratings does not appear. Not because those products are bad, but because we have no way to say anything true about them.
The same product does not carry a whole site. Where one item would otherwise appear across a large number of pages, that is a signal we have run out of things to say, not a signal the product is exceptional.

What we have not done — and will not pretend to have done

This matters more than any of the above, because it is the claim most affiliate sites quietly fudge.

There is no test lab here. We do not buy every product we mention, put it under load and measure the deflection. Anyone claiming otherwise about a catalogue this size is not telling you the truth.
Most product images are not our photographs. Where a page carries a diagram, it is a drawing made to explain the mechanism — a joint, a runner, a hinge — and not a photograph of the specific item being recommended.
Hands-on experience is stated where it exists, and not implied where it does not. Where a repair on this site has actually been carried out on a real piece of furniture, the page says so in the first person and shows it. Where the advice comes from documentation and established practice, the page reads as what it is.

The useful thing this site can offer is not a laboratory. It is the willingness to read the specification properly, to work out what the seller has left out, and to say when the cheap option is fine.

Where we currently fall short

A standards page that only lists standards is marketing. These are the known gaps, and they are here so you can hold us to closing them:

Source lines are not yet on every page. Figures are researched against published references, but the reference is not always named in the article itself. It should be, on every page carrying a number, and adding them is the current priority.
First-hand photography is thin. The plan for this site calls for photographs of real repairs and real grain on the majority of pages. We are nowhere near that yet.
Coverage is uneven. Some categories are answered several layers deep and others have barely been started. An empty category is not a judgement about the furniture.

Corrections

When a page here is wrong, it gets corrected in place. We do not silently delete a page and pretend it never existed, and we do not leave a wrong measurement standing because a correction is embarrassing.

The Updated date shown on each article changes whenever its substance changes. Where a correction changes the advice — a different part number, a different dimension, a reversed recommendation — the page says what changed rather than quietly swapping the figure.

Reports of wrong measurements, wrong part numbers and wrong species claims are the most valuable mail this site receives, and they get answered. Tell us which page, and what the right figure is: the contact page has the address.

Independence

No brand, retailer or manufacturer has any say in what appears here. Nobody pays for placement, nobody reviews a page before it is published, and nobody can have one removed for being unflattering. Products are ordered by how well they fit the question the page is answering, never by what they pay. The full commercial picture — who pays this site, how much, and what that money does not buy — is on the Affiliate Disclosure page, and what happens to your data is on the Privacy Policy page.