NO!

nononononononnonononoNnO!NO!NONON!!NONONONO!!NON!ON!!!NO!NO!NNONO!

...dammnit I'm being negative again, I just can't help it.

Box modeling is the defacto process, you won't be able to control your polygon counts very well with nurbs, you won't be learning the industry standard for creating content of just about all varieties and you'll be learning an outdated and abandoned system. It's simply too difficult to do adaptive refinement using NURBs.

Subdivision modeling or box modeling are the words you want to keep in mind, especially when creating game content. Just forget you ever heard the words nurbs unless you are creating high poly organic man made objects. That's pretty much all it's used for now.

Also the reason your oranges look funny is because you need a displacement and or bump map to make them significantly less even, and you need a specular highlight, oranges are quite reflective little buggers, and right now you have them shaded somewhere around peach fuzz. Also a Skin SSS shader would do wonders on them once you feel up to the task.

Finally if you really want to bring the whole scene alive, bevel every sharp edge, nothing in the real world is razor sharp, if you don't bevel every corner you lose all of the specular highlights along sharp edges. You'll be amazed at how much your scene will improve just by beveling. And keep at it, you're on the right track.

Edit: It looks like you have some shadow glitches around a couple of the legs (there are light patches around where the table meets the floor), I believe that is caused because you have your shadow bias set too high.