Lifestyle and Leisure
How to furnish your Canadian home
Jo-ann Hodgson asks four emigrant families now living in Canada about the best places to buy quality furniture and grab bargain buys, and what the Brits’ problem is with Canadian beds
A home is not a home without furniture, so the old saying goes. Well okay, that might be a pearl of wisdom from ye days of old, but it's true nonetheless. Let's face it, you're going to Canada to start a new life, not for a holiday, so whereas living out of suitcase might suit you just fine for a few weeks while you find your feet, the quicker you set up home and establish yourself, the better. And your new abode would be a pretty poor excuse for a home without somewhere to sleep, eat your breakfast and snuggle up and watch TV.
Here we talk to four families who have made the move about the good and bad sides of Canadian furniture. "We took very little with us from the UK, and there was no furniture amongst that," says emigrants Richard Meredith who now lives in Ontario. "We actually had very little to bring as we had purposefully been living in very small rented accommodation in order to save as much money as possible to make our move."
Caroline Harrison and her family did the exact opposite and took all their furniture with them to Alberta. "We'd already checked on the price of things and it worked out more economical to keep the things we had and ship them rather than sell them for next to nothing and buy a load more when we got to Canada," she says. The Merricks and Wilsons, who made the move to Canada five and two years ago respectively, come somewhere in between these two. "We brought a couple of beds, a three-piece suite and a few other furniture items over with us to Alberta," says Mez Merrick, the man of the house. "We took most of our furniture from the UK over to Nova Scotia," Mike Wilson adds. "The couple of items we decided at the time to leave, would have easily fitted in our new home; in fact we also bought new sofas and a dining set in Britain and had them dispatched straight to our shippers so we could reclaim the VAT. On reflection, we should have bought more."
Mike and Orla Wilson run uk2novascotia.com, a settlement, jobs and real estate service for emigrants, and say their advice to their clients "would be to bring absolutely everything as you will find room for them somewhere in what will no doubt be a larger home." However much or little furniture you take with you to Canada, you're undoubtedly going to need to buy items in the future, so where do you go to find these pieces? "We've bought a lot of our furniture from a store called Leons," Richard says. "It's a large chain of stores and sells a wide range of goods. "An extremely good place to buy solid wood furniture is from the Mennonites. They are exceptional craftsmen and their work is excellent. We bought our dining table and chairs from them. They're solid oak, and made to our specifications. They'll last forever."
To all you IKEA addicts out there, there's no need to worry as you'll still be able to get your fix of cheap, fashionable furniture in your new home. "I bought a bed from IKEA for my eldest son when he outgrew the one we brought over with us," Caroline says. "They are the most reasonable for things like that. "For great quality and style, I do like The Pier and Sears, although I usually only get things in the sales from here. Unfortunately, the smaller stores, although offering some unique items, tend to be pricey and I like to know I've got a bargain. But I'd say that there is a lot of great, well-made Canadian furniture I would like to buy." The Wilsons name World of Furniture, Ashley and Sears and Wheatons as good places to pick up furniture. "Stores like Wal-Mart and Zellers are good for more disposable furniture and flat-packs, which was handy for kitting out our garage with ready made shelving," they say.
As the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure – and this is a saying that other people might actually have heard of – so garage sales, auctions and classified ads are always worth looking out for. Richard is a regular visitor at garage sales and just last month found himself a bargin. "We bought an excellent kitchen table and four chairs for $100. "Spring time is big for garage sales and in our small town, there must have been about 20 garage sales in one weekend last month." "We also buy a lot of small items, garden tools, workshop equipment, etcetera, from auction sales, he says. "We've bought some furniture from classifieds," says Mez. "There is a paper called The Bargainfinder here, but with Calgary being such a spread out city you can literally travel for a couple of hours or more there and back, just to buy a chair."
One of the main pieces of furniture Brits have trouble with in Canada is beds. Where sizes, prices and even components are different to what you know, it's bound to throw you. In fact the whole subject has got Caroline rather confused. "For some reason I can't fathom, single beds are called twins in Canada, even though you still only get one," she says. "These are roughly the same size as singles in the UK. The English king-size is closest to a queen-size here, but you might find it's still a bit of a stretch to get your covers to fit!" Mez was equally taken aback when he went on a search for beds. "We went to a furniture store to buy a couple of cheap beds and that was our first mistake: thinking that they would be cheap. "And you can't just buy a bed," he continues. "Firstly, you buy a box spring (the bottom of the bed), then the mattress. There are a large variety of both these things, none being that cheap, and then you also have to buy a headboard. An average Queensize will cost over CDN$1000." "As with most furniture in Canada when you first come over you fall into the trap of converting back to pounds so everything seems half price," adds Mez. "But when you start earning Canadian dollars, prices are pretty much comparable to England." Caroline agrees: "I think that if you're coming here with pounds you'll enjoy the experience greatly, but once you start paying with dollars, the furniture does seem to be on a par with the UK, except for beds. Really good quality beds are very expensive here."
The most popular woods used to make furniture in Canada are Maple, Birch, Oak, Cherry and Pine but there seems to be conflicting opinions about the fate of wooden furniture taken over from the UK. "Most wooden items brought from England like wardrobes, cabinets and even pianos can shrink and warp quite dramatically in the dry climate here," says Mez. But he has some opposition in the form of Caroline who states that "if anyone tells you your wooden furniture will dry out and become useless in Canada, you shouldn't believe them. "All of our wooden furniture is absolutely fine and we live in a very dry area as opposed to the humidity in the UK," she says.
It seems that on this matter it may be best to do your own research about the particular type of wood you want to take out with you. But as for the other questions of where to find quality furniture and bargin buys and that pesky matter of bed sizes, shapes and what not, we hope you're a bit clearer on what lies ahead of you in your new home.
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