Have you ever had trouble furnishing your residence hall? Maybe you lacked the budget or had a bad experience with a vendor?
Or maybe the quality of the furniture wasn’t what you hoped for or the installation was late and messy?
This is especially disappointing when you’ve poured your heart and soul into a new building project or renovation and then things don’t go perfectly at the end with your furniture installation.
And given the increasing centrality of the residence hall in student learning and the prominent role of furniture in creating high quality informal learning spaces, you need everything to go perfectly with your furniture installation.
Our Preemptive Approach Gives You Peace of Mind
There are so many issues that can trip you up during a residence hall furniture project.
Over the last 45 years, DCI has evolved our operation in direct response to most if not all of these issues. In fact, our full suite of services is designed to make sure that you don’t have to deal with the kind of issues that often crop up with other companies.
Let’s review some of the key issues that schools like yours face when you need to furnish a new or existing residence hall and how we preempt them through our services.
1. Customize Customize Customize
Often you already have a vision for what you want your furniture to look like. You’ve seen collections that inspire you. Or perhaps you have some very specific functional needs or space limitations.
Maybe you need to increase occupancy and turn your doubles into triples or your triples into quads.
We have solutions for all of these situations and much more. You see, whether your concern is upleveling design or doubling your bed count, you can customize to your heart’s content.
At DCI, we have an amazing and seasoned team of in-house engineers and designers who can customize any space or piece of furniture.
If you’re looking for a particular style, a unique design, or a sofa that has to be two inches shorter to fit in a tight space, we can do it for you.
2. Need Custom Planning & Design Support?
Some facilities managers aren’t always sure how to select the right furniture for their space. What sizes do you need? Which design is appropriate and best suited to your situation? Are you missing any special considerations?
No problem. We can help you with space planning and interior design all the way down to the fabric selection process.
Our expert in-house interior designer will assist your housing staff in selecting the right furniture to best compliment your residence hall.
You need to ensure that your students have the ideal atmosphere to work, socialize, and relax. That’s where we can help. We specialize in the details.
The truth is, we love designing spaces. And during the project planning phase, we regularly provide you with room layouts generated with our architectural drafting software.
3. Too busy? We’ll Manage Your Project…All of It.
If you’re like most facilities managers, you’re incredibly busy. Not only that, the end of summer is one of the craziest and most stressful times for managers like you.
You have enough on your plate as it is with all the incoming students. The last thing you need to do is manage a major project and installation.
We feel you. Big time!
We’ve been doing this for a long time and that’s why we take care of everything and try to make your job as easy as possible. We want to have the lightest possible footprint on your campus.
How do we do that?
For every project, we provide a Project Manager who oversees your project and process from the moment the contract is awarded through final installation, inspection, and walkthrough.
And when it’s time for the installation, we have an experienced team who travels project-to-project ensuring successful installations and long-term customer satisfaction through warranty and field service work.
4. Delays In Your Schedule? We’ve Got You covered.
Sometimes construction delays happen. You have a plan and a date for installing your brand new furniture, but the deadline for construction of your new residence hall just got pushed out again. Or maybe you have a renovation that’s running behind schedule.
It’s not a problem for us.
If you have unforeseen construction or renovation delays, we can warehouse and store your new furniture at any of our manufacturing locations until you’re ready for the furniture to be installed.
5. What Should You Do With Your Old Furniture?
Ok, the moment has arrived. You’re ready to install all your beautiful new furniture. But then you realize that you still have to get rid of all the old furniture you’re replacing.
No problem.
Sustainability is a core part of our mission at DCI. We do whatever we can to make sure that your old furniture doesn’t land in the dump and we’re proud of the sheer volume of furniture we’ve kept out of the landfill.
To be sure, we appreciate the challenge of dealing with furniture that has passed its useful life on your campus.
To accommodate for this, we’ve developed several options for you to avoid sending your old furniture to the landfill.
- First, depending on your project specifics, we can remove and sell unwanted furniture to other customers.
- Second, we can remove and donate it to charitable organizations locally, regionally, and abroad. For example, we regularly take old furniture Habitat ReStore.
In the last few years, we’ve loaded over 175 trailers and shipped them to charitable organizations around the world.
6. Quality Should Be Your First Consideration
What’s the worst thing that can happen with a furniture installation? You find out that the furniture quality is poor. After a few years, it all starts to fall apart under the burden of heavy residence hall usage.
Often, you won’t realize the issues at first. It can take a year or more for quality issues to reveal themselves.
But let’s be clear, your furniture should last for decades. That’s why we have furniture at a lot of schools that’ still in service after 30 years.
It’s also why we have a 25 year warranty for all of our furniture. So what does that mean exactly?
DCI warrants our furniture to you for 25 years from the date of purchase. During that time, we guarantee your furniture will be free from material and manufacturing defects.
Within this 25-year period DCI will repair or replace all defective items at no charge.
Your Housing Staff Will Love This Service
And this brings us to another service that guarantees the quality of your furniture for decades to come.
We believe in our furniture. And we want you, our higher education and military partners, to have total confidence in the quality and longevity of your furniture.
That’s why we perform a unique service for all of our partners to back up our sustainability commitment.
At no cost to your school, we offer you a complete service inspection after one year to ensure everything is functioning properly, and then we make any needed corrections.
This “Tune-Up” is another way that we follow through on our 25-year Guarantee
We can perform subsequent check-ups at your request. This ensures all your furniture is serviceable and reduces burdens on your housing and facilities staff. The tasks we perform during the walkthrough include:
- 100% inspection
- Level wardrobes
- Check that all drawers operate smoothly and correct any issues
- Confirm all glides and levelers are in place and replace those missing
- Check all magnets and hinges on doors.
Your Housing Team Is Busy Enough
Most issues with furniture will crop up within a year or so. By making sure all the furniture is working optimally and addressing any issues in that timeframe, we’re making sure that your furniture will be free of future defects.
We all know that your housing team has enough to deal with on a daily basis. Transitional spaces like residence halls take a beating and require a high level of maintenance because of the nature of the service they provide.
If we can lighten the load on your staff by ensuring that your furniture is functioning perfectly, that’s a service we are more than happy to perform. The truth is, we think of it as our obligation.
Service Is Our Business
After working in this business for so long, we’ve seen everything. We’ve worked with hundreds of schools like yours over the last 45 years. That experience uniquely qualifies our team to give you a seamless experience of service.
We will solve any and every problem you can imagine. Yes, we’re in the furniture business. But to be honest, we put as much energy into fabulous service as we do in building great furniture.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us here: [email protected].