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I tend to think of Ikea as high end crap furniture. It's made mostly of the same components as all of the other crap furniture but it's generally had enough eng

I tend to think of Ikea as high end crap furniture. It's made mostly of the same components as all of the other crap furniture but it's generally had enough engineering and testing put into it that you can be sure it's strong enough for what you want it to do. As an aside, if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed. As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece.

dagw 6y ago
if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed We have the 'same' dresser bought three times in three different years. The first one is pretty solid wood, the second one is more particle board, but still decent, the newest one is much flimsier and much more lightweight particle board and is actually falling apart while the two older ones are still going strong.
Ma8ee 6y ago
> As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. ... Don’t tell me about it. I built an Enzo Mari bookshelf and afterwards realised I had built an IKEA Ivar but spent the double price in wood.
the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
I found that if you're the type of person that likes to customize their furniture then IKEA is a good starting point. Both for the choices of material and because a lot of stuff is compatible. A big reason most of our (non custom made) furniture is IKEA is because it strikes a pretty ideal balance between price and quality and allows you to "get to town" with changes. Most other "crap furniture" does not at all support such modifications to it. For starters because some of the things we bought even though they said solid wood on the label did not actually fully consist of solid wood and were useless after cutting off a piece.
jfk13 6y ago
On the other hand, I understand that customising/"hacking" Ikea products is also something of a thing.... e.g. https://www.ikeahackers.net https://www.ikeahackers.net
pjc50 6y ago
> It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece. Well, yes, we're back to supply chains here; just as on digikey you might find that the unit price for 1x an item is twice the unit price for 100x or even 10x, the supply chain to bring you a tiny quantity of wood to enjoy the premium experience of being a craftsman is quite expensive compared to anything mass-produced. You are paying for the experience of making it yourself. (And this is before we get into relative wood pricing between countries; it took me a long time to understand why America had all those wood-framed and paneled houses while they're virtually absent in the UK, and of course it's because the local old forests were depleted in previous centuries. To the point where there was a whole pre-20th century peasant architecture of stone houses with only a single piece of serious lumber in: the roof beam.)
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  Absolutely, it doesn't make it any less soul destroying to understand the logic of it though! You may well be right about the reason traditional British houses are made of stone and brick. However, if you watch a new build house going up you may well be surprised to see that the structure of the house is entirely wood framed (often mostly off site). The floors and the roof are all held up by the wood framework. A brick facade is then installed and tied into the wood framework.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    Depends on the country. It's a reinforced concrete structure( including floors) where I live and double brick walls with insulation between them here. We have lots of sand so concrete is relatively cheap. I have literally never seen a single house made out of wood here and I have been to a lot of construction sites.

dagw 6y ago

if you ever buy the same piece of Ikea furniture a few years later it's interesting to see what has been changed We have the 'same' dresser bought three times in three different years. The first one is pretty solid wood, the second one is more particle board, but still decent, the newest one is much flimsier and much more lightweight particle board and is actually falling apart while the two older ones are still going strong.

Ma8ee 6y ago

> As a bit of a hobbyist wood worker, Ikea furniture is slightly soul destroying. ... Don’t tell me about it. I built an Enzo Mari bookshelf and afterwards realised I had built an IKEA Ivar but spent the double price in wood.

the_mitsuhiko 6y ago

I found that if you're the type of person that likes to customize their furniture then IKEA is a good starting point. Both for the choices of material and because a lot of stuff is compatible. A big reason most of our (non custom made) furniture is IKEA is because it strikes a pretty ideal balance between price and quality and allows you to "get to town" with changes. Most other "crap furniture" does not at all support such modifications to it. For starters because some of the things we bought even though they said solid wood on the label did not actually fully consist of solid wood and were useless after cutting off a piece.

jfk13 6y ago

On the other hand, I understand that customising/"hacking" Ikea products is also something of a thing.... e.g. https://www.ikeahackers.net https://www.ikeahackers.net

pjc50 6y ago

> It's often more expensive to buy the wood stock materials than it is to buy the finished Ikea piece. Well, yes, we're back to supply chains here; just as on digikey you might find that the unit price for 1x an item is twice the unit price for 100x or even 10x, the supply chain to bring you a tiny quantity of wood to enjoy the premium experience of being a craftsman is quite expensive compared to anything mass-produced. You are paying for the experience of making it yourself. (And this is before we get into relative wood pricing between countries; it took me a long time to understand why America had all those wood-framed and paneled houses while they're virtually absent in the UK, and of course it's because the local old forests were depleted in previous centuries. To the point where there was a whole pre-20th century peasant architecture of stone houses with only a single piece of serious lumber in: the roof beam.)

VBprogrammer 6y ago
Absolutely, it doesn't make it any less soul destroying to understand the logic of it though! You may well be right about the reason traditional British houses are made of stone and brick. However, if you watch a new build house going up you may well be surprised to see that the structure of the house is entirely wood framed (often mostly off site). The floors and the roof are all held up by the wood framework. A brick facade is then installed and tied into the wood framework.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  Depends on the country. It's a reinforced concrete structure( including floors) where I live and double brick walls with insulation between them here. We have lots of sand so concrete is relatively cheap. I have literally never seen a single house made out of wood here and I have been to a lot of construction sites.