8 ms·

The true story of the Amazon door desk (2011)

79 points by PascLeRasc 7y ago

dang 7y ago
Interesting discussion from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210868
mh8h 7y ago
I used to work as an SDE for Amazon at their Vancouver, BC office. The door desk was the default desk you would get. And they were, as Amazonians call it, the "frupid" option. There was a long wait time, and they were shipped from Washington.
- allthecybers 7y ago
  Then everyone requested an ergonomic height-adjustable desk and they had to move those door desks somewhere. Very frupid indeed. I wonder how many warehouses of door desks they have somewhere.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Would be funny if Amazon of all companies would throw up their hands and jam excess junk in a storage warehouse somewhere.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Sell em as vintage .com 1.0 memorabilia.
itronitron 7y ago
Attaching 4x4's, or any board, as the desk legs seems like overkill. The correct way to do this is to just place the door on a pair of sawhorses.
- gamegoblin 7y ago
  A 12ft 4x4 (enough for 4 desk legs) can be had from Home Depot for $12.75. It might be structural overkill, but it's pretty cheap. A simple sawhorse made out of 2x4s will probably need 20-30 linear feet of wood, depending on the design, which will $7 - $10 per sawhorse, or $14-$20 total. Building the sawhorses also takes more time than installing 4x4 legs, so labor cost is higher. Of course, the 4x4 legs will likely need some brackets for strength against horizontal forces (e.g. leaning against the desk), so the total price including labor probably comes out as a wash.
greggman2 7y ago
attaching legs to a door sounds like overkill. For many years I had a door on top of 2 sawhorses. Easy to move. I used an indoor door so lighter than an outdoor door. Had no issues. IIRC I put cloth over the sawhorses both because the door sat better on cloth and because I could arrange the cloth to cover the end of the sawhorse sticking out to avoid spliters.
jeffrallen 7y ago
I sat at a door desk, arranged with 7 others into a pinwheel under a garden umbrella at Tellme, and it was awesome. Of course that was a great team, and the trains rushing by were fun too.
tlb 7y ago
My last startup had about 10 desks built like this, a solid wood door with 4x4 legs attached with metal brackets. They were pretty good. The advantage of this design over sawhorses is that you can sit anywhere without bumping your legs. I put a monitor and keyboard in the middle, used the left side for mechanical parts and right side for paperwork. At the time (early 2000s) it was really hard to buy manufactured desks. Herman Miller desks cost like $3000 and had a 6-8 week lead time. But you could build a DIY desk for $200 in 90 minutes including the trip to Home Depot.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  A cheap Dania dining room table with extendable leaves works great, too. It's fairly light, sturdy, and lots of workspace.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Why was it hard to buy desks? Herman Miller is top of the line, but even today at any big box office supply store you can find ~5 ft desk for ~$150. And there's always IKEA for even less.
  - ArtDev 7y ago
    At Ikea in Portland I spent $35 for the largest top and 4x$4 legs. So just $51 for a nice looking dependable desk.
    - ericd 7y ago
      Hollow core doors are around $30 at HD, and probably larger than that top.
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    50% of the people in these startups are so backward that they have never even been in a furniture store or apparently can’t buy used desks for next to nothing. The other 50% seem to be cultivating faux “look how frugal/hard working we are” sentiment.
  - 7y ago
WalterBright 7y ago
I don't much care for the look & feel of plywood. My favorite workbench I built out of ordinary lumber bolted together with carriage bolts, and the surface is 1x8 unfinished pine planks screwed down. It feels good, looks good, and has that nice pine smell.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  High grade plywood can look and feel nice. My desk is a height adjustable base, with 3/4" baltic birch as the top. I put a chamfer on the top edge, and drilled desk grommet holes, and then put a couple coats of lacquer on it.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
Speaking only for myself, now everyone in my office has an adjustable height standing desk. It's wonderful and way better than the standing options at the prior companies I was at that you could only get if you had a documented medical issue.
- valbaca 7y ago
  During our team's recent move/restack, about 80% of our desks were replaced with adjustable standing desks. The door desk is dying.
  - arafa 7y ago
    Indeed. The word is that's the new policy and standard (adjustable height desks for all).
- dehrmann 7y ago
  I tweaked my back at the gym and spent a ~week standing at my desk. It wouldn't have been worth it to have a doctor check me out and get a special desk for just a week, so having the option was very nice.
craigkilgo 7y ago
Is the implication that the purpose of the door desk was to merely APPEAR frugal? Or did it have some other original purpose entirely? I still didn't quite get that part.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  Yes, that's the implication.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Yes, that's the implication, but it even if it was for appearances, It still would have been much less expensive than anything considered "commercial" grade, though you could always get something from IKEA or a spartan option from a big box office supply store for around $100 to $150.
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    Per tfa they were custom doors and cost more than most desks.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      He claims they were expensive, but in the top of the article he states two other things: That it's been so long he can't be relied on for accurate recollections, and also that when they first started using door, it did in fact make financial sense. Most doors have a margin that can be cut to the desired height, which is what "tfa" said was done. That doesn't make it a custom door though. The author said he observed the desks being made, so it sounds like he saw them being cut to the desired height and, not knowing that was common for doors, assumed they must be expensive and therefore custom. Maybe they were expensive! But the author is not a reliable narrator on the topic, and without some better evidence I'm not inclined to believe amazon went from using typical solid-core doors for a while, but then went out of their way to find very expensive doors.
  - WWLink 7y ago
    I'd guess the door desks cost $100-150 to build, more if they had a dedicated desk builder. XD I have a hard time believing that'd be cheaper than having a stock of ikea desks and having your new employees put them together on their first day. Source: Someone that had to put an ikea desk together on his first day at his internship. xD Honestly that was not the worst place I worked at either.
vonmoltke 7y ago
I never really understood how these desks were "frugal". I looked into doing something similar in early 2005 after hearing stories about these, but solid-core doors were more expensive than the other options. I ended up buying two two-drawer filing cabinets (because I needed storage space anyway), running two 2x4s between them, and laying two 2'x4' sheets of MDF on top. All the parts, including the filing cabinets, cost less than a solid-core door alone.
- tbyehl 7y ago
  > I never really understood how these desks were "frugal" Ditto. It might make sense to build a door desk if you happen to have a suitable door in need of disposal. My girlfriend made a decent workstation out of a 3/4" 4x8 melamine panel ($30), some cheap Ikea Kallax-like shelf units for legs ($20/ea), white corner trim ($1.75/ft) to make the edges nice, and whatever the screws and nails cost. Probably $120 all-in.
- davio 7y ago
  SF startup I visited in 99/00 had doors with 2 file cabinets as the standard desk. Seems a lot more practical and requires no construction tools or skills.
- disordinary 7y ago
  It depends on where you get the doors from, you could probably get used ones from building recyclers or ebay for very little.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    Used doors would make sense. I always got the impression they were buying new ones, though.
- phd514 7y ago
  At least where I live, solid core slab doors are $40 at Home Depot. You could almost certainly build a desk top from lumber that would be cheaper, but not by a significant margin.
RHSeeger 7y ago
A couple points of correction > The hollow-core doors wouldn't have supported the weight—they would have cracked in places under the strain. Having used my own hollow core desks going back to 1985 or so (with an original IBM PC sitting on such a desk)... I have yet to see a reasonable load they would crack under. You run a 1x1 beam along the back and sides for support, and they'll hold 2 computer cases and 2 CRT monitors (smaller ones, but consider that LED monitors weight a LOT less than CRTs did) with no issue whatsoever. > moving a exterior door through an interior door frame with legs permanently attached is a tricky task Having literally _just_ built a shop table out of a solid core door and 3/4" plywood (for the bottom shelf) with 4x4 legs, this isn't an issue. You build it so that the legs are bolted to the top (or, more specifically, 2x4s attached to the top with L-brackets) and then take them off (a couple minutes of work), move the desk, and them put them back on (a bit more than a couple minutes, but still not bad). I built my workbench in my garage and them moved it down to the basement shop (because it doesn't have walls yet and the sawdust from cutting would have made a mess), finishing the task just this past weekend. Side note... if you follow a similar route, I recommend a 28" wide door. I originally bought a 32" and had to cut it down after realizing it would be uncomfortable reaching over it to the pegboard on the wall to retrieve items. It cost me somewhere in the range of $400 to complete the workbench, I believe (I'm not positive on that). If you add in the time to build it (if you have to pay someone), it most certainly would have been cheaper to buy a desk (I agree with him here).
- clairity 7y ago
  > "Having used my own hollow core desks going back to 1985 or so (with an original IBM PC sitting on such a desk)... I have yet to see a reasonable load they would crack under." yup. part of the founding tale of idealab, the pasadena startup incubator, is the use of hollow-core doors on filing cabinets as desks. they have maybe 150 such desks in use there. i've used them and they're more than adequate for that purpose.
- linsomniac 7y ago
  I also came here to comment on the hollow core doors "breaking". Back in the late '80s I made myself a hollow core door desk. I didn't use a 1x1 beam either. Hollow core doors are what is called "torsion box" design, and they are stupidly strong for their weight. I used a hollow core door supported on one end on a filing cabinet (which really was a bit high, even for me), and on the other end by a cheap sawhorse I built using 2x4s and some metal brackets. I can remember having at least two largish monitors (17" CRTs), and associated computers on them, and they never seemed to have any problem carrying the weight. Used them for probably a decade, before I switched to a more mobile chic and disassembled the desk for scrap. Similar: My grandfather, back in the early '80s, got a line on some scrap hollow core doors with a nice birch veneer. He turned them into some great 2.5'x6' bookshelves, and I loved those things! The sides, shelves, and back were still hollow core doors, so fairly thick. The would hold a full complement of books, no problem. But I could carry both of them at once. I could put a palm in the middle of the top shelf and lift one up with each hand. Don't underestimate the strength of a torsion box!
zelly 7y ago
That famous picture of Bezos with a spray-painted "Amazon.com" sign above his desk was also a lie and for show. Bezos was very certain he would become a billionaire and planned carefully to appear rags-to-riches. You have got to admire that kind of long term planning and conviction. What a brilliant guy.
- xxpor 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure he was already a billionaire when that was taken.
  - tomjakubowski 7y ago
    The video is from 1999 and, quoth Wikipedia: "He was first included on the Forbes World's Billionaires list in 1999 with a registered net worth of $10.1 billion."
- hello_newman 7y ago
  Is there a source for this claim? If so, I'd like to read it and learn more about it
  - solveit 7y ago
    Pretty sure they're being facetious.
  - frogpelt 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuI-ss5aQU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuI-ss5aQU8 Go to 7:47.
news_to_me 7y ago
> before they split the warehouse (down south of the viaduct) and the offices (in the heroin district of Seattle near Pike Place Market) before I joined. Ugh. Sorry, this is off-topic. I wish people who characterize Seattle like this just left. Sure, maybe there is a heroin epidemic and it's more visible in some areas than others, but downtown Seattle and Pioneer Square (arguably more sketchy) are so much more than the "heroin district". They're also beautiful and interesting neighborhoods, full of wonderful people. /rant
- yourbandsucks 7y ago
  It's way off topic considering they were talking about 90s Seattle and you don't seem to be. Anyways, it read like tongue-in-cheek humor to me.
toomanybeersies 7y ago
There's really no point in making your own furniture these days unless you're doing it as a hobby. Ikea and other flatpack furniture shops have made furniture so insanely cheap. MDF and plastic fittings have made furniture cheap and disposable, when it used to be something that would last a lifetime (or several, I have furniture from my grandparents). Now it's often easier to just throw your Ikea shit on the side of the road when you move house than it is to take it with you. I've built plenty of my own furniture in my time, it's something that I really enjoy. But if I was trying to save time or money, I'd never bother.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  Disposable furniture is not worth the cost. Buying a 300 dollar chiar seems dumb until you throw out 7 50 dollar chairs in the meantime. Not to mention the environmental impact of this antique mindset.
lbotos 7y ago
The best "startup" desk that I've seen used often, and even brought to my home office is using the Ikea melltorp dinner table as a desk: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/melltorp-table-white-s19011777/ https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/melltorp-table-white-s19011777/ It's sizable, metal framed with a tabletop (not 4 legs screwed into a top), and $69.
- PascLeRasc 7y ago
  I've been using a dinner table as my home desk for a while now, I really love it [1]. It's the perfect height, the surface feels great, and it looks beautiful. Best of all, it was free on trash night! [1] https://i.imgur.com/TSo7BK6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TSo7BK6.jpg
astura 7y ago
Jeff shows off his desk here: https://youtu.be/Q4f41fqxftU?t=75 https://youtu.be/Q4f41fqxftU?t=75
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Thank you, was a great video. Comparisons of that time are cringy, especially about the stock market, but he succeeded through the 2001 bubble and the 2008 crisis. His first house in Seattle shows he wasn’t afraid of cutting costs for his lifestyle.

79 points by PascLeRasc 7y ago

dang 7y ago

Interesting discussion from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210868

mh8h 7y ago

I used to work as an SDE for Amazon at their Vancouver, BC office. The door desk was the default desk you would get. And they were, as Amazonians call it, the "frupid" option. There was a long wait time, and they were shipped from Washington.

allthecybers 7y ago
Then everyone requested an ergonomic height-adjustable desk and they had to move those door desks somewhere. Very frupid indeed. I wonder how many warehouses of door desks they have somewhere.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Would be funny if Amazon of all companies would throw up their hands and jam excess junk in a storage warehouse somewhere.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Sell em as vintage .com 1.0 memorabilia.

itronitron 7y ago

Attaching 4x4's, or any board, as the desk legs seems like overkill. The correct way to do this is to just place the door on a pair of sawhorses.

gamegoblin 7y ago
A 12ft 4x4 (enough for 4 desk legs) can be had from Home Depot for $12.75. It might be structural overkill, but it's pretty cheap. A simple sawhorse made out of 2x4s will probably need 20-30 linear feet of wood, depending on the design, which will $7 - $10 per sawhorse, or $14-$20 total. Building the sawhorses also takes more time than installing 4x4 legs, so labor cost is higher. Of course, the 4x4 legs will likely need some brackets for strength against horizontal forces (e.g. leaning against the desk), so the total price including labor probably comes out as a wash.

greggman2 7y ago

attaching legs to a door sounds like overkill. For many years I had a door on top of 2 sawhorses. Easy to move. I used an indoor door so lighter than an outdoor door. Had no issues. IIRC I put cloth over the sawhorses both because the door sat better on cloth and because I could arrange the cloth to cover the end of the sawhorse sticking out to avoid spliters.

jeffrallen 7y ago

I sat at a door desk, arranged with 7 others into a pinwheel under a garden umbrella at Tellme, and it was awesome. Of course that was a great team, and the trains rushing by were fun too.

tlb 7y ago

My last startup had about 10 desks built like this, a solid wood door with 4x4 legs attached with metal brackets. They were pretty good. The advantage of this design over sawhorses is that you can sit anywhere without bumping your legs. I put a monitor and keyboard in the middle, used the left side for mechanical parts and right side for paperwork. At the time (early 2000s) it was really hard to buy manufactured desks. Herman Miller desks cost like $3000 and had a 6-8 week lead time. But you could build a DIY desk for $200 in 90 minutes including the trip to Home Depot.

WalterBright 7y ago
A cheap Dania dining room table with extendable leaves works great, too. It's fairly light, sturdy, and lots of workspace.
ineedasername 7y ago
Why was it hard to buy desks? Herman Miller is top of the line, but even today at any big box office supply store you can find ~5 ft desk for ~$150. And there's always IKEA for even less.
- ArtDev 7y ago
  At Ikea in Portland I spent $35 for the largest top and 4x$4 legs. So just $51 for a nice looking dependable desk.
  - ericd 7y ago
    Hollow core doors are around $30 at HD, and probably larger than that top.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  50% of the people in these startups are so backward that they have never even been in a furniture store or apparently can’t buy used desks for next to nothing. The other 50% seem to be cultivating faux “look how frugal/hard working we are” sentiment.
- 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago

I don't much care for the look & feel of plywood. My favorite workbench I built out of ordinary lumber bolted together with carriage bolts, and the surface is 1x8 unfinished pine planks screwed down. It feels good, looks good, and has that nice pine smell.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
High grade plywood can look and feel nice. My desk is a height adjustable base, with 3/4" baltic birch as the top. I put a chamfer on the top edge, and drilled desk grommet holes, and then put a couple coats of lacquer on it.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

Speaking only for myself, now everyone in my office has an adjustable height standing desk. It's wonderful and way better than the standing options at the prior companies I was at that you could only get if you had a documented medical issue.

valbaca 7y ago
During our team's recent move/restack, about 80% of our desks were replaced with adjustable standing desks. The door desk is dying.
- arafa 7y ago
  Indeed. The word is that's the new policy and standard (adjustable height desks for all).
dehrmann 7y ago
I tweaked my back at the gym and spent a ~week standing at my desk. It wouldn't have been worth it to have a doctor check me out and get a special desk for just a week, so having the option was very nice.

craigkilgo 7y ago

Is the implication that the purpose of the door desk was to merely APPEAR frugal? Or did it have some other original purpose entirely? I still didn't quite get that part.

AlexCoventry 7y ago
Yes, that's the implication.
ineedasername 7y ago
Yes, that's the implication, but it even if it was for appearances, It still would have been much less expensive than anything considered "commercial" grade, though you could always get something from IKEA or a spartan option from a big box office supply store for around $100 to $150.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  Per tfa they were custom doors and cost more than most desks.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    He claims they were expensive, but in the top of the article he states two other things: That it's been so long he can't be relied on for accurate recollections, and also that when they first started using door, it did in fact make financial sense. Most doors have a margin that can be cut to the desired height, which is what "tfa" said was done. That doesn't make it a custom door though. The author said he observed the desks being made, so it sounds like he saw them being cut to the desired height and, not knowing that was common for doors, assumed they must be expensive and therefore custom. Maybe they were expensive! But the author is not a reliable narrator on the topic, and without some better evidence I'm not inclined to believe amazon went from using typical solid-core doors for a while, but then went out of their way to find very expensive doors.
- WWLink 7y ago
  I'd guess the door desks cost $100-150 to build, more if they had a dedicated desk builder. XD I have a hard time believing that'd be cheaper than having a stock of ikea desks and having your new employees put them together on their first day. Source: Someone that had to put an ikea desk together on his first day at his internship. xD Honestly that was not the worst place I worked at either.

vonmoltke 7y ago

I never really understood how these desks were "frugal". I looked into doing something similar in early 2005 after hearing stories about these, but solid-core doors were more expensive than the other options. I ended up buying two two-drawer filing cabinets (because I needed storage space anyway), running two 2x4s between them, and laying two 2'x4' sheets of MDF on top. All the parts, including the filing cabinets, cost less than a solid-core door alone.

tbyehl 7y ago
> I never really understood how these desks were "frugal" Ditto. It might make sense to build a door desk if you happen to have a suitable door in need of disposal. My girlfriend made a decent workstation out of a 3/4" 4x8 melamine panel ($30), some cheap Ikea Kallax-like shelf units for legs ($20/ea), white corner trim ($1.75/ft) to make the edges nice, and whatever the screws and nails cost. Probably $120 all-in.
davio 7y ago
SF startup I visited in 99/00 had doors with 2 file cabinets as the standard desk. Seems a lot more practical and requires no construction tools or skills.
disordinary 7y ago
It depends on where you get the doors from, you could probably get used ones from building recyclers or ebay for very little.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  Used doors would make sense. I always got the impression they were buying new ones, though.
phd514 7y ago
At least where I live, solid core slab doors are $40 at Home Depot. You could almost certainly build a desk top from lumber that would be cheaper, but not by a significant margin.

RHSeeger 7y ago

A couple points of correction > The hollow-core doors wouldn't have supported the weight—they would have cracked in places under the strain. Having used my own hollow core desks going back to 1985 or so (with an original IBM PC sitting on such a desk)... I have yet to see a reasonable load they would crack under. You run a 1x1 beam along the back and sides for support, and they'll hold 2 computer cases and 2 CRT monitors (smaller ones, but consider that LED monitors weight a LOT less than CRTs did) with no issue whatsoever. > moving a exterior door through an interior door frame with legs permanently attached is a tricky task Having literally _just_ built a shop table out of a solid core door and 3/4" plywood (for the bottom shelf) with 4x4 legs, this isn't an issue. You build it so that the legs are bolted to the top (or, more specifically, 2x4s attached to the top with L-brackets) and then take them off (a couple minutes of work), move the desk, and them put them back on (a bit more than a couple minutes, but still not bad). I built my workbench in my garage and them moved it down to the basement shop (because it doesn't have walls yet and the sawdust from cutting would have made a mess), finishing the task just this past weekend. Side note... if you follow a similar route, I recommend a 28" wide door. I originally bought a 32" and had to cut it down after realizing it would be uncomfortable reaching over it to the pegboard on the wall to retrieve items. It cost me somewhere in the range of $400 to complete the workbench, I believe (I'm not positive on that). If you add in the time to build it (if you have to pay someone), it most certainly would have been cheaper to buy a desk (I agree with him here).

clairity 7y ago
> "Having used my own hollow core desks going back to 1985 or so (with an original IBM PC sitting on such a desk)... I have yet to see a reasonable load they would crack under." yup. part of the founding tale of idealab, the pasadena startup incubator, is the use of hollow-core doors on filing cabinets as desks. they have maybe 150 such desks in use there. i've used them and they're more than adequate for that purpose.
linsomniac 7y ago
I also came here to comment on the hollow core doors "breaking". Back in the late '80s I made myself a hollow core door desk. I didn't use a 1x1 beam either. Hollow core doors are what is called "torsion box" design, and they are stupidly strong for their weight. I used a hollow core door supported on one end on a filing cabinet (which really was a bit high, even for me), and on the other end by a cheap sawhorse I built using 2x4s and some metal brackets. I can remember having at least two largish monitors (17" CRTs), and associated computers on them, and they never seemed to have any problem carrying the weight. Used them for probably a decade, before I switched to a more mobile chic and disassembled the desk for scrap. Similar: My grandfather, back in the early '80s, got a line on some scrap hollow core doors with a nice birch veneer. He turned them into some great 2.5'x6' bookshelves, and I loved those things! The sides, shelves, and back were still hollow core doors, so fairly thick. The would hold a full complement of books, no problem. But I could carry both of them at once. I could put a palm in the middle of the top shelf and lift one up with each hand. Don't underestimate the strength of a torsion box!

zelly 7y ago

That famous picture of Bezos with a spray-painted "Amazon.com" sign above his desk was also a lie and for show. Bezos was very certain he would become a billionaire and planned carefully to appear rags-to-riches. You have got to admire that kind of long term planning and conviction. What a brilliant guy.

xxpor 7y ago
I'm pretty sure he was already a billionaire when that was taken.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  The video is from 1999 and, quoth Wikipedia: "He was first included on the Forbes World's Billionaires list in 1999 with a registered net worth of $10.1 billion."
hello_newman 7y ago
Is there a source for this claim? If so, I'd like to read it and learn more about it
- solveit 7y ago
  Pretty sure they're being facetious.
- frogpelt 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuI-ss5aQU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuI-ss5aQU8 Go to 7:47.

news_to_me 7y ago

> before they split the warehouse (down south of the viaduct) and the offices (in the heroin district of Seattle near Pike Place Market) before I joined. Ugh. Sorry, this is off-topic. I wish people who characterize Seattle like this just left. Sure, maybe there is a heroin epidemic and it's more visible in some areas than others, but downtown Seattle and Pioneer Square (arguably more sketchy) are so much more than the "heroin district". They're also beautiful and interesting neighborhoods, full of wonderful people. /rant

yourbandsucks 7y ago
It's way off topic considering they were talking about 90s Seattle and you don't seem to be. Anyways, it read like tongue-in-cheek humor to me.

toomanybeersies 7y ago

There's really no point in making your own furniture these days unless you're doing it as a hobby. Ikea and other flatpack furniture shops have made furniture so insanely cheap. MDF and plastic fittings have made furniture cheap and disposable, when it used to be something that would last a lifetime (or several, I have furniture from my grandparents). Now it's often easier to just throw your Ikea shit on the side of the road when you move house than it is to take it with you. I've built plenty of my own furniture in my time, it's something that I really enjoy. But if I was trying to save time or money, I'd never bother.

whenchamenia 7y ago
Disposable furniture is not worth the cost. Buying a 300 dollar chiar seems dumb until you throw out 7 50 dollar chairs in the meantime. Not to mention the environmental impact of this antique mindset.

lbotos 7y ago

The best "startup" desk that I've seen used often, and even brought to my home office is using the Ikea melltorp dinner table as a desk: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/melltorp-table-white-s19011777/ https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/melltorp-table-white-s19011777/ It's sizable, metal framed with a tabletop (not 4 legs screwed into a top), and $69.

PascLeRasc 7y ago
I've been using a dinner table as my home desk for a while now, I really love it [1]. It's the perfect height, the surface feels great, and it looks beautiful. Best of all, it was free on trash night! [1] https://i.imgur.com/TSo7BK6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TSo7BK6.jpg

astura 7y ago

Jeff shows off his desk here: https://youtu.be/Q4f41fqxftU?t=75 https://youtu.be/Q4f41fqxftU?t=75

alexis_fr 7y ago
Thank you, was a great video. Comparisons of that time are cringy, especially about the stock market, but he succeeded through the 2001 bubble and the 2008 crisis. His first house in Seattle shows he wasn’t afraid of cutting costs for his lifestyle.