Whenever I need to build housing or furniture in maya, I just prefer to use primitives of wich I konw the sclae, and to make the complex object just tall enough, (which consists out of multiple objects) I use the 'snap to points' command and move the outer vertics to the same X / Y / Z as the exact scaled ones of the primitive. This is quite handy for scaling some parts of complex objects to good sizes after scaling a part of them (that doesn't appear in the attributes), but this doesn't work if you want to scale an entire object to a certain length (so it doesn't work with multiple 'layers' of vertics).

Hope this was of any help to ya!