And I do have to agree. I can remember what ghastly furniture most shops used to have around here. There was a lot of what we call "cabin furniture" - which isn't made to look good, just be practical. (Well, some people like that look, but it is a bit...dull). Sure, there was more solid wood furniture, but guess what: that durability comes at a cost. Not only in terms of money, but also in terms of how easy it was to install and move.
And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
As for quality: I have owned some pricey designer furniture and I can't say that I'm always impressed with the quality. Yes, if you have a lot more money you can get really well built furniture. But IKEA is more often than not more than sufficient quality. (Also see their "hidden tags" campaign)
If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price. (Collectible furniture is a whole different deal where you don't actually care all that much about quality, but more about it being an original piece).
For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means. And I'm not trying to make some clever rhetorical point here. I can't really think of any company that offers what they offer and comparable quality, looks and price here in Europe.
For example, having young kids is not a good time to have a nice teak dining room table. (Or new wood floors for that matter) (or really anything nice you don’t want to hide in a locked box or room)
Also, pets, like a cat is wonderful. But without great diligence a more lower mid-tier couch will get clawed up the same as an ikea special. At least it may be more comfortable in the meantime.
I suspect wealth may be having your cake and eating it too—-you have fancy furniture that kids or pets wreck and you file that under dc.
All of it screams for automated materials reprocessing. One can only hope that the collision of robotics and AI will reduce the amount of landfill we create.
I look in antique/thrift/charity/freecycle/secondhand stores or groups. Where I live you can pick up a solid hardwood dresser for a few hundred bucks, because as you say - nobody wants their parents’ heirlooms. And lots of things can be had for free if you can hire a van to collect.
A month ago I got an entire king-size bed headboard (with storage), with cabinets on each side, and a bridge that connects the two cabinets across the top (and has lighting - also there is power in the headboard - needs a few upgrades though).
It was made in 1986 - solid wood.
I paid $1 CAD at an estate sale...
Now, the matching dresser with a tri-fold mirror was $175.
Why the difference? No one wanted the hassle of disassembly for the bed unit - but many felt they could probably flip the dresser.
Admittedly, I had to rent a U-Haul (say about $100 including gas) and rope in a family member to help with the move. (because, it had to be at least 800lbs of awkward parts...)
So, my all in was $276 plus some auction fees.
But - still cheaper, more durable and better looking than most "DIY assembly options".
OTOH - if we move again, this sucker stays with the house...
The best alternative to IKEA furniture is more expensive IKEA furniture.
This highly depends on the furniture. As an example, my dad built some custom pieces out of solid oak that are absolutely finding a place in my house after he's gone.
Now that you have published this online, police will visit you to remove the Billy!
Perhaps I am too pessimistic with German laws.
PS: It looks much better this way.
One high and one low one, this is so the gas does not build up in case of a leak.
Would highly suggest you get that sorted, your insurance might be void in case you do get a fire.
Now I will either get older recycled furniture for quality or pieces from IKEA for cost.
Why is it inside your apartment?
Does someone have to check the meter regularly?
Anyway, great job.
I suspect the tragedy in Pennsylvania [1] was the catalyst. There are lots of potential issues with keeping these things indoors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.
I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.
If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
We have furniture from IKEA that we bought at least five years ago that still functions great. A mattress we got from them is absolutely stellar with a memory foam topper; all of our guests love it. I think our coffee table is ten years old now.
However, everything goes to hell once you try to take it apart. This is why our mattresses are not on IKEA bed frames. Taking them apart has ALWAYS weakened them significantly. (We use Thuma Japanese joinery bed frames, which are AMAZING for moving and very high quality).
Which is kind of moot when you're talking about high-quality furniture, as they are usually single pieces as well.
IKEA has a wide range of products, some fall apart quickly, some last longer.
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
That said, moving some of this flat pack furniture has been a mixed bag. Some move well, some don't.
I did have a wall unit, a $99 hardware store particle board piece assembled with big screws and those interesting, round cam fasteners. It survived three separate moves, including one where it flew out the back of my pickup truck onto asphalt (thankfully in a gas station, vs the freeway I was about to get on). Corner got dinged, door flew off, but it survived!
But I've had other pieces that assemble and are rigid, when torqued around through the moving process start to come undone. The particle board and fasteners are designed for loads only in specific directions and tend to not do well, and fail, outside of those.
same.
> and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them
That is wise. I don't claim disassembling it for move was a good idea, but it compressed my stuff into a compact car.
Consider also that some of their beds don't fit through a doorway built (esp if doorway is not code width) so some level of disassembly may be required for mere room-to-room moving.
I'm only calling out a tradeoff that may or may not apply. Not everyone is you and me.
> I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a
The whole point of this thread (this site?) is repurposing outside of creator intent.
Really liked this garden sink for barbecuing: https://ikeahackers.net/2017/06/outdoor-sink-perfect-summer-...
I think really the only IKEA product that has given me issues is the MARKUS chair, and more specifically, the gas spring leaking. Apart from that, I think everything is more or less functional? Even the five-euro LACK coffee table is still fine, even if it has signs of use on it. I've also bought used IKEA shelves and they're still holding up fine.
IKEA is ideal for a certain stage of your life. It's ideal for optimizing vertical space. It's largely function over form. It looks like middle school classroom furniture. And when junior writes on it w/ a sharpie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
When you have the space for a separate dining room, agreed that used antiques are comparable in price.
I wouldn't touch their couches rich or poor though; they're painful.
I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.
If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.
I'd be hesitant to recommend a novice to pursue a glue-up/planing project if they weren't already interested in woodworking.
Like a Kallax, unless you're a real wizard you couldn't cobble one of those together without a lot of skill.
Take two drawer units, and instead of putting the tops on them they were supplied with, put a slab of desktop across both of them with a gap between and you’ve got yourself a desk.
I had a broken cupboard in a rented apartment, and just built a new replacement one for €15. The bureau in the article could cost 2x..3x of this, which is still lower than overpriced IKEA furniture. (Good furniture, that isn't made of cardboard, is overpriced in IKEA.)
How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.
Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.
Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.
> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.
But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.
But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).
I ordered my kitchen fronts from such a place, to fit on … an IKEA kitchen. Giving it a different look, but the benefits of standardised units and the IKEA universe. This was customised mass-production, but still about 3x IKEA price point.
That's not the case in the US.
The big box hardware stores have a large track saw vertically mounted that can cut full sheets of wood, but there usually isn't someone working who is trained to operate it. They also have a rickety cart with a hand saw and tape measure attached with too short cables that you can try to use to make your cuts of dimensional lumber.
In general, you always start with outside dimensions, board thickness, having a kick plate or not (eg. when you make it wheeled), will you chamfer/round the edges and then the rest is simple calculation. You add internal shelve/drawer dimensions and it can consider those too.
I had some scripts that worked with an older version of FreeCAD and printed the cutting list to a CSV, but it still was not the perfect solution.
Interestingly, local chipboard/MDF shops here in Serbia would do that as a service for you on their CNC machines (at additional cost, obviously :)).
(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)
Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.
Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.
I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)
Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.
But CNC isn't the silver bullet. What I ended up with is 25mm glued wood for frames, 55mm for tops and 15mm plywood plus veneer for facades.
If you use 19mm for frames, you won't have enough strength for hinges, which would inevitably be abused.
If you use 19mm for tops, they will sag and vibrate. The best top I have is actually 55mm IKEA glued oak.
For my project, I believe 19mm is plenty for carcasses - just about every mass-produced kitchen uses 18/19mm chipboard frames, and they can last for decades, outside of abnormal abuse. The main reason for using the same size is easy compatibility with standard doors/fronts together with standard fitment hinges/runners, all of which I'll be purchasing. The tops will be either granite or concrete.
Like, using plywood for verticals is overkill, they don't experience any bending, while 19+19 is 48 so you might as well use glued wood board for example.
That seems parameterizable.
ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.
my shop is next to a cabinet maker who does most of is work in that same birch hard-ply. he's got the full sheet router, but he only really uses it for special projects. its mostly just the big table saw. he's got a subcontractor that just does drawers. most cities have several of his kind of shop, and while they don't have a design website they generally work from napkins. I think that birch ply has gotten really expensive in the last 5 years though.
As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.
https://erinkestenbaum.com/2018/12/12/hacking-the-ikea-pax-i...
https://archiyou.com/articles/enzo-mari-s-autoprogettazione-...
It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).
I left off "as cheap" because you didn't say it, but it's a huge part of the puzzle that you deliberately ignored, too. But I'm really interested in seeing these "furniture panels" that you're recommending.
After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.
I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.
Then when you start it's obvious sunk cost fallacy
Turning the thing into something a little bit more mobile.
Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.
Ever since then, I avoid sharing pictures of IKEA furniture. Like Mattel, suing barbie blogs of children. If I did not design it, I won't share a picture of it. Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
? In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place). In the there's the assumption you can photograph anything without a 'do not photo, military dogs' etc. Never heard of a non-publishable building. Even gchq can be photo's.
Just because you can photograph it does not mean you can necessarily publish it. IP rights are a recognized exception to the 1a