Used furniture: how to spot the faults that cannot be fixed

A solid oak dresser turns up on a local listing for sixty dollars because the family is moving Saturday and it will not fit in the van. That is the good version of buying used. The bad version is the same photograph and the same price, attached to a particleboard carcass that swelled under a leaking radiator two winters ago. In a phone picture the two look identical. What separates them is a short inspection you can run standing in a stranger's hallway.

One rule gets you through most of these decisions: surfaces are cheap to fix and structure is not. A scratched top, a dated finish, missing knobs, a drawer that sticks — those are an afternoon each. A cracked seat rail, a joint that has been glued three times with the wrong glue, or a swollen chipboard panel are not worth the gas you spent driving over.

Work out what it is actually made of

Furniture is sold on how the front looks and lives or dies on what the sides and back are made of. There are three families: solid wood, veneer over a stable core, and melamine or paper foil over particleboard. Only the last is a real problem, and it photographs the best of the three, because printed grain has no knots or color variation to give it away.

Veneer by itself is not a mark against a piece. Some of the best furniture ever built is veneered, because a thin slice of figured wood over a stable core moves less with the seasons than a wide solid panel does. What matters is the core. Veneer over plywood or lumber can be repaired. A printed surface over compressed chips is a one-way material: screws strip, edges chip, and once water gets in, the swelling never comes back down.

• Look at the underside and the back. Furniture is honest where nobody looks — real wood shows mill marks and color variation, particleboard shows a speckled surface like pressed granola.
• Find a corner where the top meets the edge. On solid wood the grain wraps around; on veneer it stops at a hairline seam.
• Pull a drawer out and look at its sides. Dovetails, even machine-cut ones, mean somebody cared. Staples through a butt joint mean they did not.
• Check the back panel. Quarter-inch plywood set into a groove and screwed will outlive a sheet of hardboard stapled to the outside edge by decades.

The five-minute physical check

1. Push the top corner diagonally, gently. A case piece should barely move. A little give means loose joints; a lot means the glue is finished.
2. Open every drawer to its stop. Watch for one that noses down as it comes out, which means worn runners or a missing kicker above it.
3. Sit in every chair and lean back like you mean it. Chairs fail at the back legs first, because that is where the leverage lands.
4. Run a hand under the seat rail and into the inside corners. Corner blocks that are glued and screwed are a good sign. Glue shadows with no blocks mean they fell off.
5. Open the table. Extension slides seize up, and a table that will not open is a table that seats four forever.
6. Look at the screw heads. Stripped slots and bright new screws in old wood say the piece has been repaired at least once.

A wobble is not automatically bad news. Chairs are the most repairable furniture there is: knock the frame apart, scrape the old glue off the tenons, glue and clamp it, and the joint that failed will not be the one that fails next. What you cannot fix at a sensible price is a screw hole stripped out of chipboard, a crack running lengthwise through a load-bearing rail, or a joint someone has filled with construction adhesive, which sets like a rock and can never be taken apart again.

Smell it before you commit

Open a drawer or a cabinet door, put your head in, and breathe. A closed compartment concentrates whatever the piece has been absorbing, which makes it far more honest than the room — the room was aired out for you. Musty means it was stored somewhere damp, usually a garage or a basement, and that the glue has been through humidity cycles that did it no favors.

Smoke and mustiness are negotiable. A few weeks in dry air with the drawers out does most of the work, and sealing raw interior wood with a shellac-based primer blocks the rest. Cat urine in upholstery foam is not negotiable. It returns every time the humidity rises, and the only fix is new foam, which costs more than the sofa did.

Upholstery deserves more suspicion than wood

Bring a flashlight and look along the seams, around the tufting buttons, and under the dust cover on the bottom of the frame. You want to see nothing at all in those folds — no dark specks, no shed skins. If it is ambiguous, walk. A used sofa saves you a couple hundred dollars. A bedbug problem costs an exterminator, a mattress, and a month of your life.

What is genuinely worth buying used in upholstery is a frame. A hardwood frame with intact springs and tired cushions is a candidate, because new foam and a slipcover are ordinary expenses. Reupholstery is mostly labor, so it only makes sense on a frame that deserves the labor. A stapled softwood frame with cushions sewn permanently shut is not that frame.

Price it against the repair, then measure the doorway

Then take out a tape measure and use it twice: once on the furniture, once on the narrowest point of the route home. Interior doorways in most homes run about 30 to 32 inches wide, and for a sofa the number that matters is not the length but the height of the end profile, because it goes through on its side. Stair turns and elevator doors are where the surprises live. Measure those before you leave home, not after the piece is in the truck.

Go with a flashlight, a tape measure, gloves, an old blanket, two ratchet straps, and cash. Missing hardware is a fair reason to offer less, since you are the one hunting down six matching pulls. And a listing that says make me an offer late on a Sunday usually belongs to somebody who has booked a van for Monday.