Decorative Touch LTD

Loving this new model home we just finished. Thank you Gabriel Homes for letting us be part of your team!!
Southern Meadows-Makenna

Completing a “model” home is challenging but SO worth it!!
9 months and 100’s of little decisions - and the grand finale when the furniture and accessories finally arrive!!
2 days of labor but this new baby is gorgeous - proud to be part of this team!! Thank you Gabriel Homes - Southern Meadows

Las Vegas Market 2024!!

You’ll see this one from start to finish.
It’s quite a process building your dream home…hundreds of tiny decisions to be made!!
We are here to help.
One choice at a time with the end result in mind, call us if you are overthinking and overwhelmed.
We’ve helped so many homeowners achieve their dream home 🏡

Just getting started on our next Gabriel homes model-it’s gonna be a beauty-more to come 🏠

“Fall In Love” with Your Home!!
We can help 🍁🍁🍁

So when you think your armoire is old and tired. Just rethink it. Lots of life left in this beautiful piece. Add a fresh coat of paint, add shiplap in the back - add a little more height, and that old piece becomes a show piece - LOVE repurposing-and what a beauty she is now 💗

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=6709864062370802&id=100000418234223&mibextid=0cALme

We Just completed our newest Richmond model for Gabriel Homes!!
We love the black,grey, and golden yellow 💗

Our newest Gabriel Homes model—
We love it!! Hope you do too 😊

Decorative Touch LTD updated their phone number.

The Decorative Touch Ltd and Janine Terstriep of Lenexa, KS
Awarded Best of Houzz 2022

2022 people’s choice award highlights top home professionals among the Houzz community, based on quality service and most popular designs

Lenexa KS USA, January 28th, 2022 – The Decorative Touch Ltd of Lenexa KS has won a “Best of Houzz” award for Design and Customer Service on Houzz®, the leading platform for home remodeling and design. The Decorative Touch Ltd was chosen by the millions of homeowners that comprise the Houzz community from among more than 2.7 million active home building, remodeling and design industry professionals.

This is the 10 year anniversary of the Best of Houzz awards program. Badges are awarded annually, in three categories: Design, Customer Service and Photography. Design awards honor professionals whose work was the most popular among the Houzz community. Customer Service honors are based on several factors, including a pro's overall rating on Houzz and client reviews submitted in 2021. Architecture and interior design photographers whose images were most popular are recognized with the Photography award.

“Best of Houzz 2022” badges appear on winners’ profiles as a sign of their commitment to excellence. These badges help the more than 65 million homeowners and home design enthusiasts on Houzz to identify popular and top-rated home professionals for their projects.

The Decorative Touch Ltd offers time savings solutions to your decorating needs and has been doing so in the Kansas City area for over 30 years!!

“We launched the Best of Houzz awards program over a decade ago to highlight the work of the most talented and customer-focused professionals in our industry,” said Liza Hausman, vice president of Industry Marketing at Houzz. “When homeowners come to Houzz to find professionals to complete their projects, the Best of Houzz badges offer a marker of credibility, supporting their decision to move forward. We are extremely proud of this year’s winners, many of whom have won multiple times, and we’re pleased to give them this recognition and a platform on which to showcase their expertise.”

You can see more of The Decorative Touch Ltd’s work on Houzz.com

About Janine Terstriep
Clients say “Janine is willing to push us out of our “box” and suggest solutions that are perfect for our home remodeling. She is a such an asset when choosing all the selections during the building process. She is efficient, organized and full of ideas."

About Houzz
Houzz is the leading platform for home renovation and design, providing people with everything they need to improve their homes from start to finish. On Houzz, people can find design inspiration, and research and hire home professionals. The Houzz community is made up of millions of homeowners, home design enthusiasts and home improvement professionals around the world. Houzz is available on the web and as a top-rated mobile app. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Houzz also has international offices in London, Berlin, Sydney, Moscow, Tel Aviv and Tokyo. Houzz is a registered trademark of Houzz Inc. worldwide. For more information, visit houzz.com.

This little “Sally” chair is really comfy and very versatile—one of my Norwalk favorites ✅

What's better than one swivel chair? TWO!

This pair of Sally Swivel Chairs, with their distinctly contemporary attitude, look dreamy in this bedroom. Customize your Sally here >> http://ow.ly/e1r550H9wqt

Photo:Herman's Furniture & Design

Love this chair - just enough comfort and support 😊

We all deserve some alone time with a good book in a cozy chair. Our Brockton Chair makes a great spot to relax. Customize your own here >> https://norwalkfurniture.com/31520

From our house to yours - have a safe and happy Thanksgiving 🍁🍁🍁

Customize your new sectional today- delivered in about 20 weeks 😊

Dee Frasier of D'Kor Home describes the Laguna Sectional as "absolutely hands down one of the most comfortable bouclé cream sectional sofas I’ve ever sat on!"

See the D'Kor BLog here >> http://ow.ly/pZOW50GNGoO or visit their instagram page

The Laguna Sectional was designed by Kim Salmela for Norwalk Furniture and introduced at the High Point Market last month.

The Wall Street Journal article in Design and Decorating on Oct 30th was right on target....Supply chains haven't been this backed up since the 1960s...
The perfect storm of people being home more than ever, and wanting to update, while supply shortages are running wild!!
To quote~"You can have a baby quicker than you can get furniture!!"
Sad to report, it's NOT going to get better experts say til 2023...
My advise is take a teaspoon of PATIENCE before you place any custom furniture order...
We have been spoiled to say the least, and our new "normal" is just not like it used to be!!

As a designer, this is unexpected, and really difficult to navigate...Trust me I miss 2019!!

The good news is, if you buy USA made products the wait is about 4- 5 months~~teaching us all to buy local and buy USA!!

Proud to show off our newest model home in Boulder Creek~~thanks Janet for ALL your help~~and thanks Gabriel Homes for letting us do what we do best!!

A favorite of mine—if you need a snuggle spot, this chair is amazing 😊

THIS JUST SENT FROM ONE OF OUR SUPPLIERS....ITS LONG BUT WORTH THE READ...WHY IS YOUR FURNITURE IS SOOOO DELAYED!! HANG IN THERE IT WILL BE WORTH THE WAIT~~~


Why the Sofa You Purchased Months Ago Is *Still* So Delayed

Kaitlin Petersen, editor in chief of trusted industry resource Business of Home, tells shoppers what to expect going forward.

You’re finally ready to pull the trigger on that sofa you’ve been eyeing for months—only to discover it could take 12, 18, or even 24 weeks to arrive. So frustrating! The pandemic may have kick-started delays in the furniture industry, but the situation’s been exacerbated by other factors, from the housing boom to bad weather in the Gulf Coast. While it’s hard to wait on a much-coveted item, it may help to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

You start at the back of the line.

A “custom sofa” may sound fancy, but in fact, most quality sofas involve some level of customization. If you’re shopping for an American-made product and you’ve made any choices about the piece you’ve picked out—its length, leg style or finish, upholstery fabric, or the type of filling in the cushions—you’ve bought a made-to-order couch. (There isn’t some giant warehouse housing every potential combination, just waiting to be ordered.) Your selections may not seem like a big deal, but they set into motion a complicated system.

It takes manufacturers about 9 to 14 days to make a sofa—that hasn’t changed. But because of industry-wide delays, you’re at the end of a long queue of backlogged orders when you click “purchase.” Once the manufacturer gets to your order, your piece gets scheduled for the coming weeks—its dimensions are configured, specifications for the frame are drawn up, a pattern for the upholstery fabric is generated, and the foams your piece will need are ordered in the right shapes and sizes. In the days that follow, various teams assemble all of the parts and pieces that will ultimately make up your sofa.

Fabric production has been disrupted.

Your sofa may be made in the U.S., but its fabric probably isn’t. Some furniture brands do source from domestic mills, but Belgium, India, Turkey, and countries throughout Asia are the main centers of textile production—and just like American manufacturers, their operations were shut down for months as their countries battled COVID-19. Looking for leather? That typically comes from tanneries in Italy, which has also struggled with repeated lockdowns.

Manufacturers do keep hundreds of thousands of yards of fabric in stock. Still, problems at the mills—whether production delays or extra-long shipping times—can hold up a piece for weeks. Another wrinkle? Supply chain disruptions in the chemical industry (more on that later) have recently triggered major delays for some performance fabric makers, who don’t have access to the compounds they need to make their yarns or the protective coatings on their textiles. (One fabric supplier recently adjusted its lead times from 6 weeks to 24 weeks overnight—proof that manufacturers feel your pain when it comes to waiting for goods to arrive!)

There’s another, more subtle factor at play that precedes COVID shutdowns: the doom-and-gloom predictions about the impact of the pandemic. “The stock market was hitting an all-time low, and that was scaring a lot of people,” says Serena & Lily’s senior vice president of sourcing Wayne Bautista. “The fear for furniture retailers was that people would be out of jobs, so there wouldn’t be any demand.” Brands cautiously started scaling back their projections. Mills, in turn, started shrinking their own production plans. Everyone in the industry was bracing for a slowdown.

And of course, the opposite happened. Instead of demand cratering, it skyrocketed. After reopening from COVID shutdowns, factories were not only short on supplies, they faced an incredible surge of new orders to contend with.

Wood and metal parts can be hard to come by.

In an ironic twist, the boom in home building that’s generating so much demand for furniture is making wood used in furniture more difficult to come by—and more expensive. The framing on your house and in your sofa isn’t made of the same lumber, but furniture manufacturers are now competing with builders for attention from busy lumber mills, who are so in demand that they can now charge more for the same work.

While some companies might be inclined to downgrade their raw materials to cut costs, high-end furniture manufacturers use very specific, kiln-dried hardwoods to frame their pieces, which means they don’t have many backup options when scarcity or sky-high prices set in. At retailer Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams (which manufactures its own pieces at three facilities in Taylorsville, North Carolina), the company’s commitment to high-quality, sustainably sourced materials is a source of pride—but CEO Allison O’Connor admits that it also makes it harder to find replacements. “We won’t substitute other raw materials if we know we can’t deliver on our lifetime warranty,” she says. The company builds its own frames on-site, but other manufacturers order custom frames from local shops—some of which experienced COVID-related challenges of their own.

Metal components, too, can be tricky to source. Items like sofa springs are often manufactured locally, but anything more complicated—think sleeper sofa components and swivel chair mechanisms, drawer glides—is likely produced in Asia. Obtaining these has been complicated by an imbalance in international trade, spurred by Americans’ online shopping during the pandemic, which has resulted in a shortage of container ships. Meanwhile, goods that do arrive in the U.S. face delays at overcrowded ports.

There’s a shortage of skilled labor.

As the pandemic spread across the country, furniture factories stopped production for upwards of two months last spring. (Some opened in a limited capacity to produce PPE.) Though orders during that period were initially slow, they soon piled up on top of the existing queue. Then, just as factories were beginning to come back online, orders exploded. Meanwhile, factories were inventing and implementing new safety procedures that slowed down the pace of work.

When factories reopened, not everyone came back to work. Several manufacturers reported that absenteeism—whether due to illness, mandatory quarantines after exposure to COVID, or because of remote learning or a lack of childcare—is only now beginning to fall back to pre-pandemic levels. Even with factories extending hours and running overtime, the labor shortage made playing catch-up even more difficult.

Benchmade furniture is a lot like couture dressmaking, where new employees learn a specialty from a master craftsperson. Some of the sewing techniques, spring-tying, and upholstery work can take years to learn—which makes staffing up to turbocharge production nearly impossible. Even if there had been no external supply chain delays, manufacturers still would have experienced some bottlenecks around highly skilled tasks that take years of training.

Suppliers are rationing foam.

The notion of rationing supplies has an old-timey, sepia-tinged feel to it, conjuring up World War II restrictions on staples like canned goods, panty hose, or blue jeans. Rationing doesn’t exactly seem like a 21st-century phenomenon. But at the moment, that’s what’s happening with the foam used to make everything from the seats in your car to the sofa of your dreams.

Chemicals that are combined to create foam are byproducts of the oil refining process, and U.S. production is centered along the Gulf Coast. Though foam is lightweight, its bulk makes it inefficient to ship as a finished product. Instead, production is often located near local industry, with foam plants sourcing chemicals from Texas and Louisiana and storing them on-site. Factories typically have several foam suppliers, which each provide a different type of product—and one sofa might have two or three different types of foam in it. (A piece’s tight back, sink-into-it cushions, and middle-of-the-road seat may all be made of different foams, for example.) Furniture production relies on all of these parts and pieces arriving in the right place at the right time so that they can be built, sewn, and assembled.

It’s a complex dance—and if one element doesn’t come through, everything else has to wait. “A sofa can use several parts of foam, and if one part or type is missing, that’s going to throw off the entire production lead time because of the component they’re waiting for,” explains Bautista. “Everything is just unwinding, and supplies are so inconsistent that we need to have longer lead times as a buffer.” As demand for foam skyrocketed and vendors weren’t able to replenish their supply of chemicals fast enough, they started telling furniture manufacturers that they wouldn’t be able to deliver 100 percent of their orders as early as last fall.

Then, on top of everything, an ice storm rocked the Gulf Coast in February. There are only three domestic chemical producers of one key ingredient in making foam, and two producers of the other—all of which were sidelined by the unexpected bad weather. In the immediate aftermath, local foam vendors announced even stricter allocations (another term for rationing) than before, in some cases delivering only 50 to 60 percent of the amount they were contracted to supply. That put a hard limit on how much furniture vendors could produce, sidelining efforts to catch up.

According to Bautista, the foam shortage has had the most devastating impact on lead times. It took about a month for the Serena & Lily’s vendors to get back to full-scale production after the two-month COVID shutdown, and its suppliers had started to close the gap by late summer. Then came an influx of holiday orders, and lead times ticked back up again, but only by a week or two. But the hard limits placed by foam rationing sent wait times skyrocketing, and offer little hope for a speedy recovery. “The demand kept increasing, but there’s only so much foam,” he says. “It’s very bad for the entire manufacturing industry—the footwear industry will be impacted because they use these chemicals as well. Who would have known that almost every industry is reliant on petrochemical solutions?”

6. Truck drivers are in short supply.

Even after a piece is finished, there may be delays in delivering it to the customer. The trucking industry was already experiencing pre-COVID labor shortages of its own, which the pandemic has only exacerbated. Bautista has heard stories of loaded-up trucks waiting in parking lots for a week or two until a driver is available.

So what now?

Though there's no magic trick to getting this stuff on time, the long-term silver lining is that these challenges will make the whole industry faster down the line—a long-term payoff thanks to operational improvements. In the meantime, knowing that you’re waiting for something good will hopefully make it feel worth it. In fact, if you find companies that are delivering quicker, it's a sign that they may be compromising in ways that the average shopper can’t see. “The realities of today are frustrating, but we will come out of this better,” says O’Connor. “We recognize that there are choices, and we hope that we can continue to gain trust [for] not taking any position that alters our quality. At the end of the day, we don’t think that [achieving] a shorter lead time by cutting corners is going to help us in the long run.”

It’s a sentiment Bautista echoes: “We use the best components, the best parts, and the best skilled labor,” he says. “We’re not going to compromise any of that.”

I’ve been a Norwalk retailer for over 30 years—great furniture—great price—made in the USA...call us for your next handcrafted piece 🌼🌼🌼

Why we love Norwalk furniture 😊

Happy National Dogs day to these furry shop dogs...great company when working from home!!

Decorative Touch LTD updated their address.

Aren't you ready for your home office to function for YOU~~We can help!! 913-219-7333

Aahh SPRING—what a welcome site especially this year—happy Spring you all 🌸🌼🌸

Why I suggest Norwalk Furniture...hand made in the USA...it just feels good!!...I've had an account with Norwalk for over 30 years!! And have visited this factory 3 times!!
Quality and a Personal touch on every piece!!...Call us today for your new upholstery needs!!

Inside Our Doors Take a look inside Norwalk Furniture's doors and watch our talented team proudly come together to make beautiful, handcrafted upholstered furniture.Video by ...

We love our newest model for Gabriel Homes...THE BELLA...a take on Modern Farm, with warm red accents...
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