2 experiences with R&B customer service: I was familiar with Room & Board when I lived in the Windy City; would wander the store thinking about what I wished I had instead of what I did have (and about how long I'd have to wait until my then-current bed had to be replaced! When I moved to a city in the Mid-Atlantic, there wasn't a Room & Board close by. I drove to N.Y. to visit an ill friend and to go to the R&B there. Bought the Ella upholstered bed, a mattress, and an armoire (I pretty much knew from the catalog/online what I wanted). Was delivered in good time, but the delivery boys didn't do a good job on 2 particulars: making sure the armoire doors were perfectly straight (there are tiny adjustable screws on the inside hinges), and drilling the holes in the botom of the bed frame for the small metal legs (they were just a "tad" crooked). I waited a couple of weeks to see if I could "live" with how the bed legs looked (and I decided I couldn't, because they were in the sight-line every time I walked up the stairs to the bedroom). And I couldn't readjust the armoire doors myself. I called R&B and within a very short time a repairperson called to make an appt to fix the 2 things. Customer service was polite and easy to deal with. Fast-forward to last summer, when I had my bedroom repainted. I put sliders on the bed legs and under the armoire, and moved them out from against the walls to the best of my ability. There was plenty of room for the painters, and I told them that under no condition can they move the bed -- the room is carpeted and I knew they'd just try to slide it. Which they did, and I was PO'd. They dislocated some of the bed legs, and the screws were pulled out. So this is going on a few years that I had made my purchase, and R&B said "no problem, we'll set up a repair appointment." No questions, no charge. I have complete confidence in R&B. Now I keep wondering if my non-R&B sofa will ever "die"! But you MUST test-sit the furniture -- you've got that right! Seat depth can vary widely and what fits one person's legs (the length between butt and the back of your knees, and how it feels sitting with your legs tucked under you) may not fit yours. Good luck!

I love this! We too have a maid's buzzer and when my DH and I gutted the kitchen I made sure to keep it and intend to put it back up on the side of the kitchen cabinet just for the heck of it. Make holes in those $$$$ cabinets - why not? Anyway, we too have a buzzer in the center of the dining room floor and, but have never seen another buzzer which would have operated it. We have a library next to the kitchen which also has an outlet in the center of the room, but there doesn't appear to be a buzzer. I am SO glad I kept that little bugger. It is definitely a conversation piece. Wish it still worked!

I can tell you that the slots on the standards don't always line up. They may *look* similar, but they can be 1/8 of an inch off, in spacing vertically, horizontally, etc. I bought one brand at one store for one room, and a different brand at another store for another room. I thought, oh, I'll use this extra bracket in there. Nope--wouldn't fit. (I'll admit that one of them was Closet Maid and the other was God-knows-what from my local "real" lumber/hardware store.) So check that before you make any definite plans. You can get liners for the wire-grid baskets, I thought.

We use the dining room for most every meal. ''Nice'' dishes, glassware, and silver live in built-ins, glassware cabinets, and sideboard in the dining room. Along with everything else - souvenirs, trinkets, priceless ceramic blobs the kids made in preschool, random batteries, a microscope, various large Lego edifices laying siege to each other, and now a landing platform for Imperial troopships, ringed with laser cannon. Daily dishes, glassware, and silver live in the kitchen, which is a Lego-free zone. The theory is, for everyday meals we often plate in the kitchen, so might as well keep the everyday plates in the kitchen. Although, we often plate nice meals in the kitchen too. Salt and pepper mini-grinders live on the dining table, and napkins in the built-ins in the dining room. There are three sideboards in the dining room - two built-in and one free-standing - so there is plenty of plunking or buffet space. Too much, actually. Nature abhors a vacuum. Serving plates live on the plate rails around the dining room walls, and nicer serving utensils live in the dining room sideboard. Two thoughts about rushing around. First, the narrow doorway between the kitchen and the dining room is the most likely place for collisions, and all things considered, it is best if the breakage is of our daily dishes rather than the china. So we want to minimize how much the china gets carried around - in teetering stacks, by some distracted child skipping to his iPod tunes - the daily stuff can break all it wants, I'm not too bothered. Second, I find the rush is most frantic before the meal, and that's when the collisions and dropsies are most common. After the meal, the guests have left and the kids are somehow absent, so it is just SWMBO and me cleaning up - there's not too much bumping and dropping potential, presuming there's not been too much drinking. So we try to minimize the haulage ahead of the meal. I find the gallon jug of milk so irritating on the dining table, especially when some feeble-fingered child drops it and milk goes flooding. If I had more inner Martha, I'd serve milk into graceful glass decanters. In a perfect world, there would be a concealed pump and hard lines carrying milk to dispensers in the dining room. In a perfect world, I'd have a passthrough to set arranged plates, and a little bell to slap. Yes, my ''perfect world'' is quite a bit different from my real world. For one thing, there would be no space battles raging while we eat.