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Lots of complaints here about IKEA furniture durability. My house is full of IKEA furniture and so far none[1] of it has fall apart. I think these tips can go

by shocks 6y ago

Lots of complaints here about IKEA furniture durability. My house is full of IKEA furniture and so far none[1] of it has fall apart. I think these tips can go a long way: - use proper tools instead of the cheap tools that come with the product - if you use a power tool on a screw, only use it for 95% of the task. finish the job with a hand-tool or you will do damage. - do not over-tighten things which screw into wood - metal into metal? LOCTITE. - you're really not going to disassemble that coffee table or small check of draws, so just use a bit of wood glue The great think about most IKEA furniture (or more generally, wood furniture) is that you can modify/fix it when it breaks. Good luck fixing those broken welds on your metal chairs! (1): Okay so my Lack coffee table fell apart, but it's also ~£5. I repaired it with wood-glue and masking tape, good as new, then gave it away for free on FreeCycle.

memsom 6y ago
It's generally great. The only thing we have that was a disaster is a wardrobe with mirrored doors. The doors are too heavy for the fittings and they basically sheared off on one side. Fixing is really hard because the door weighs too much and so is brutal on anything I've had a go at.. and being made from fibreboard, the structure is sawdust very easily. Maybe we will be able to recycle it. That would be pretty nice.
baryphonic 6y ago
Entirely agree. I've assembled loads of IKEA furniture over the years and have only rarely had quality issues. IKEA uses a lot more solid wood these days than compressed particle board, and is thus not bad. The only issue I've seen (which IKEA has attempted to remedy in its more recent iterations) is that the bottoms of some of the drawers in a chest of drawers will "bow" down under load. I've had mass-produced furniture from major brands known for quality, I've had hand-made wood furniture from NC, I've had big-box store self-assembled furniture and I've had IKEA furniture. Hand-made furniture can't be beat, but IKEA really is second best in my experience.
- mauvehaus 6y ago
  I build furniture professionally, and I agree. IKEA stuff has been engineered to within an inch of its life to hold up for a reasonable length of time while being made of the lightest possible materials. A lot of other factory made furniture is built starting from some vestige of traditional joinery, and then cheapened until it hits a price point. The construction is appalling. I don't expect mortise and tenon face frames, but pocket screws would be a much better solution than a couple of pneumatic nails, which do nothing to stabilize the case and can't be driven back in when they pull out under racking forces. At that point, the whole frame has to come off, and since the rest of the piece is as cheaply built, it's anybody's guess whether it'll hold together long enough to put the face frame back on. The thinness of veneers on the tops of things that look like solid wood is a crime too. Most pros do the bulk of their stripping chemically, which doesn't risk damaging the veneer, but you usually have to do at least a little sanding, and it doesn't take much to find out what lies beneath. The result is that you can refinish a piece once. Just like in software (which was my first career), doing repair/maintenance can be a real eye-opener. If you like the look of IKEA, it's generally a good compromise between cost and durability. EDIT: I should probably add that, in fairness, IKEA stuff , at least the particleboard or honeycomb cardboard stuff, is completely unrefinishable. I haven't seen any of their solid wood stuff come in for repair, but I'd take my chances on that if somebody wanted to pay me to.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  > IKEA uses a lot more solid wood these days than compressed particle board, and is thus not bad. I don't know what you're talking about... all the "classic" IKEA items like the BILLY bookshelf, the KALLAX (now EXPEDIT) shelves, the LACK table, the MALM chests... they're all particle board and, yes, bad quality. (Which is OK since they're cheap, that's the whole point.) Yes you've always also been able to buy solid wood stuff, like certain tables and chairs or more expensive items, but that stuff isn't replacing the classic particle-board pieces. It's not like IKEA's been moving to higher-quality stuff on the whole.
  - QuercusMax 6y ago
    I think you got that backwards - it used to be EXPEDIT, but now it's KALLAX. (Source: I just bought a whole bunch of cube-shelving from IKEA - Kallax is all over, but Expedit is nowhere to be found.)
wooger 6y ago
I would add: Add a bead of your owne wood glue for all wood - wood interfaces, and you'll massively increase the rigidity & durability. Sadly nothing can help with the problem of MDF getting chipped and gouged easily when you move house.
reader_mode 6y ago
>The great think about most IKEA furniture (or more generally, wood furniture) is that you can modify/fix it when it breaks. Good luck fixing those broken welds on your metal chairs! Good luck breaking the steel beam bed frame :) Ikea furniture is not wood it's crap particleboards, cheap plastic, etc. - repairing that looks terrible. Their paint quality is crap as well - I bought a work desk that would scratch from moving a monitor on it and has wear marks from resting my hands. Same problem with kitchen table in a rental apartment - got scratched up from regular use and no way to repair it. Hinges on sliding doors would never stop correctly and scratch up the other door, loose/flimsy feeling mechanism in the first place. I do have their standing desk - it fit the home office space perfectly and it was the only good delivery option during corona lockdown - I'm happy with that so far. In general IKEA is my least favourite furniture option but sometimes they are the most practical solution.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  >Ikea furniture is not wood it's crap particleboards My kitchen table is from Ikea, it's solid wood. My Poang chair from Ikea came with a 10 year guarantee and I expect it to last longer than that. This idea that everything that comes out of Ikea is barely going to make it home is nonsense. Of course if you buy a side table for £6 then you can't expect it to last long. That isn't representative of the whole though.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    I went to IKEA when I was building a kitchen - solid wood counter top was an option but wasn't cheaper than hiring local custom kitchen company for similar materials and I had them design a metal frame arround the kitchen island in the dimensions that couldn't be done with IKEA. My point being IKEA isn't much cheaper when you account for materials and you usually get better flexibility elsewhere. IKEA is like McDonald's of furniture, there's a place for it, but like the McDonald's fancy burger options if you're going for that you'll have significantly better options for a bit more money
    - throwawasdf 6y ago
firebird84 6y ago
I would just say use a low clutch setting on your power tools and you should be safe. My lowest clutch settings are weaker than my hand tightening.
hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
What is a check of draws?
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Probably a typo for "chest of drawers".
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
While I agree that you can justifiably write off a majority of the criticism as "a bunch of yuppies who have no business using an allen wrench complaining they assembled it wrong" there is quite a bit of validity to complaints that the wooden equivalent of a pringles chip has no business doing anything structural.
throwanem 6y ago
To your second and third points, if you have a drill/driver with a torque setting, use that and turn the torque right down before running screws into MDF. (The torque setting is the numbered collar behind the chuck on your driver, if it has one. It won't be calibrated to anything, but lower numbers mean less torque applied to the fastener before the driver stops turning it.) A low torque setting vastly reduces the hazard of splitting the MDF, or chewing up the bolt's drive socket, if you're a little careless on the trigger. Then you can hand-finish with a regular driver. I'd hesitate to use a thread locker on Ikea bolts. They're cheaply made and very mild, so it's hard enough to get them out without stripping the drive as it is; there's no way you're going to break Loctite and not end up needing to grab a bolt head with vise grips. (And that's if you break the Loctite before the drive strips. I wouldn't count on that.) At most, I'd say wait until you know there's a problem with a fastener backing out before you start thinking about gooping it up with something, and even then probably start with something less aggressive than even blue Loctite - a tiny dab of superglue, maybe.
Reason077 6y ago
> " if you use a power tool on a screw, only use it for 95% of the task. finish the job with a hand-tool or you will do damage." Or, learn how to use the torque setting properly on your electric drill / screwdriver.
- rimunroe 6y ago
  Not all drills have a torque limiter. As I understand it, you're more likely to find those on cordless drills than their corded brethren. I've actually never used a corded drill with a torque limiter, but most of cordless ones I've used have had them.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Corded drills seem hard to find these days. The only one I have is a couple of decades old, and I don't run fasteners with it, not least because it lacks both torque limiting and speed control. I'd expect a modern corded drill to live in the high-power contractor tool niche, like how a rotary hammer compares with a handheld hammer drill. Ikea, perhaps unsurprisingly, sells a cheap cordless driver ($20 US) with a torque limiter.
    - Spare_account 6y ago
      https://www.diy.com/departments/bosch-550w-240v-corded-hammer-drill-easyimpact-550/3165140840668_BQ.prd https://www.diy.com/departments/bosch-550w-240v-corded-hamme... Perhaps this is unusual in the US but entry-level corded drills are readily available in the UK. I don't know if this store is a good example, but this USA based store appears to stock a range of cheap corded drills: https://www.lowes.com/pl/Drills-Drills-drivers-Power-tools-Tools/4294607722?refinement=4294776950&int_cmp=DrillsDrivers%3AC%3ATools%3AMerch%3Acorded_drills_visual_taxonomy https://www.lowes.com/pl/Drills-Drills-drivers-Power-tools-T...
      - throwanem 6y ago
        I can't see the Lowes page right now, but Home Depot is a comparable retailer, and a store near me (but not the one I usually go to) looks to stock a couple of absolutely bottom-tier corded 3/8" drills, plus a broad range of light and medium corded hammer drills with 1/2" chucks. The broad niche between those, of general-purpose 3/8" and 1/2" light and medium drill/driver tools and impact drivers, looks to be pretty universally filled by cordless tools. (Which makes sense, given the razor-and-blades or inkjet-and-cartridges business model to which battery-powered tools lend themselves.) I wonder if corded drills might be more common in the UK because your higher mains voltage means less current is required for a given power output. With conversion losses, you can't realistically pull more than a horsepower out of a typical 120V/10A circuit without risking a breaker trip, even if there's nothing else connected to the circuit. That makes a corded tool potentially much more of a pain to use than a battery-powered one, so even if the corded version would otherwise be much more cost-efficient, it still may be a tougher sell in the US. I've heard the same power limitation described as a reason why electric kettles basically don't exist here, although since kitchen circuits are typically rated for higher current than most others, I suspect the absence of good electric kettles may have more to do with steeped tea having been displaced by drip coffee in Americans' morning cups.
crispyambulance 6y ago
Of course IKEA furniture lacks durability, much of it is made of that awful MDF (particle board). Simultaneously weak, heavy and extremely vulnerable to water damage, it's only advantage is that it's dimensionally accurate when new and amenable to automated cutting, milling and drilling at the factory. I guess it's good with laminate coatings as well. Another thing about IKEA is that if you got an old house with wide baseboards and not-quite-square walls, floors and ceilings, it's hard to make stuff like cabinets, bookshelves and counters mount properly. IKEA appears to be optimized for modern construction. Much better to just get high-quality plywood cabinets, you won't have to worry about destroying it by using normal tools. It's also lighter and you will swear less and be done sooner. Even better, hire a carpenter to install good stuff.
- Retric 6y ago
  IKEA has different product lines at different price points. They give the option of going with particle board, but spend more money and you get much longer lasting furniture. Realistically, for people that move around a lot having a very cheap option to fit each living space is just efficient. Particleboard is effectively a form of wood recycling so using it is surprisingly environmentally friendly even if doesn’t last very long. However, once you buy a place it’s time to get something that lasts.
- BillinghamJ 6y ago
  I think they generally do a lot more plywood than MDF. But ultimately depends on the price points - they do sell pieces of fairly large furniture for <£10, and indeed they're not going to be super high end.
delecti 6y ago
In my experience, IKEA furniture is a fantastic value, and has great durability, unless/until you disassemble it. If you never disassemble it then it'll stay solid for long past the point where you've gotten your money's worth. IME that's true even having exclusively used the tools that came with the pieces, and never using any additional steps (power tools, glue, loctite, etc.). If you disassemble it, it immediately starts feeling like you got what you paid for.
- vollmond 6y ago
  Even disassembling... what are people doing? I have moved several times with IKEA furniture I had to disassemble (including a big 5x5 Expedit), and it's all been fine...
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    Disassembled bed... it was never the same. My issue with IKEA is most of the furniture is not solid wood but chipboard, screws just don't hold well in it. Some of their products handle repeated putting apart and together fine, some don't. Sometimes people mess up with complex pieces of furniture. I wouldn't blame IKEA specifically, any chipboard furniture would be prone to this.
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >My issue with IKEA is most of the furniture is not solid wood but chipboard They sell lots of both. If you're buying a $10 coffee table, yes, it's going to be particle board. I feel like people are missing the core of ikea: it's well priced, stylish furniture that you can move into your condo or apartment easily.
      - saiya-jin 6y ago
        We have a double bed from chipwood that costed +-1000USD with mattress and bed slats. Slats and mattress are fine (which is expected after roughly only 4 years), but bed frame... overpriced for what it is. Will go for solid massive wood which can be found cheaper where we live. At that time there wasn't basically anything in IKEA from solid wood. So some IKEA stuff is well priced, some isn't. Some is great value for the money, some definitely isn't. Some styles are plain ugly as fk to us, some they nail pretty well for the price. I think its called hit-and-miss situation. Their kitchens are great value generally - not top notch by any means, but at given price even professionals tend to agree they are the best. If you want something better, prepare 2-3x the price. And since you never move kitchen, most complains mentioned before don't apply.
Sileni 6y ago
Agreed. Those little Lack tables are sturdy enough that they're often used as a cheap rack mounts by guitarists. Iirc they're almost perfectly a 1U width and depth, for anyone looking into a home lab. Add a couple of corner brackets and a layer of sealer and they'll take an outrageous beating. That said, a benefit to the lack(heh) of quality is how light everything is. I do a lot of projects that require using my entire living space. If it wasn't so easy to just shove the furniture out of the way, I'd have that much more inertia between me and doing what I want.
- DrOctagon 6y ago
  They're also popular among the hobbyist 3d printing community. Buy two, stack them on top of each other, then use Plexiglas sheets (or similar) between the legs of the top one and you have a cheap solution for enclosing a 3d printer.
deleted 6y ago
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crazygringo 6y ago
Most people aren't complaining about it if it stays in one spot. The issue is mainly when moving between apartments/houses. All the shifting weight and jostling in the truck simply weakens things too much. It's also not meant to be disassembled, and the particle board easily gets really banged up because it's so soft. And all this is even when trying to protect it with covering pads. (And sadly, none of your tips are going to help either -- fasteners simply pull themselves out of the soft particle board, because the board itself is weaker than the fastener/glue.) A Billy bookshelf or Kallax shelving unit will hopefully survive a single move, especially if you can tighten/glue things further after it's been moved. But once you're talking 2-3 moves, forget it. For that reason, for young professionals who move apartments every couple years in their 20's, it often makes more sense to just leave/toss their IKEA shelves/cubbies/units, and buy new pieces for the new place. It isn't durable across moves. (Obviously I'm talking about "classic" IKEA particle board flat-pack stuff. If you're buying a solid wood table or metal lamp from IKEA then it'll be fine, but that's not what most people are thinking about when they think of IKEA furniture.)
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  Ikea furniture and any flat pack furniture can usually be taken apart just fine. Just reverse the instructions. I've done it multiple times, especially when I had to fit a desk with a hutch in the back seat of my sedan. I guess for most people, it's just not worth the time to take apart all their furniture at once
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    I guess your experience is different from mine. A lot of IKEA stuff I've bought involves one-way assembly -- pounding things together with a mallet. See the EKET cabinets for example. If you reverse it by naively prying them apart, it'll strip the wood. Or take the backing to any BILLY bookshelf -- it's held in place with ~30 tiny nails. It's virtually impossible to pry the backing and nails off without destroying the backing in the process. Etc. etc. Yes, some of the pieces can be disassembled, if the assembly consists entirely of cam locks, dowels and screws. But it's certainly not designed for it.
m463 6y ago
I agree. I've found the driver torque dial to be inadequate most of the time. I'm reminded of the idea of "mechanic's feel" from "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's when you develop a sense for tightening a screw or bolt for snugness without destroying the threads, the head or the material. It's hard to do that with an electric driver in the way. (one exception might be the gyro drivers) And with respect to wood glue - I think it's worth the effort to add it to the mix with the non-metal furniture. Not only does it make the furniture more solid feeling, it also helps prevent the screws from loosening.
libraryatnight 6y ago
The desk I'm using right now is hacked together Ikea pieces and it's worked for me for about 10 years (It's the Expedit desk attachment that we expanded). It's really one of only a few Ikea bits left since my wife and I got together. Ikea made it possible to furnish our home at the time, and as we've stabilized and our careers grown, we've replaced the Ikea items with nicer things. I have no ill will toward Ikea, and while they do not make furniture you'll put in your will, they enable a lot of people to have decent things at a decent price.
0xffff2 6y ago
>you're really not going to disassemble that coffee table or small check of draws, so just use a bit of wood glue Speak for yourself. I just finished a long distance move, and I absolutely took all of my Ikea furniture apart. I'm on about year 3 of my current set of Ikea furniture, and so far it's all holding up fine. I pretty much just followed the directions, and used a power drill (with appropriate torque settings) for pretty much everything.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  I feel like there was a time when 30 years would be considered nothing for furniture durability. Heck, generations passed furniture down....
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    You can still get that kind of furniture if you want it. It just costs a couple of orders of magnitude more than even "expensive" Ikea furniture. It seems very plausible to me that there was plenty of crappy (probably homemade) furniture that wasn't any better than Ikea historically. Heirloom quality furniture takes real skill, time and materials to make. I can't imagine that the average pre-Ikea family would have been able to afford for all of their furniture to be of that quality. Not being any kind of historian, I have no idea how they filled that gap.
    - avar 6y ago
      It doesn't cost a lot, in fact you can often get it for free. This EconTalk episode is a good reference: https://www.econtalk.org/adam-minter-on-secondhand/ https://www.econtalk.org/adam-minter-on-secondhand/ The problem is that people by and large don't want solid and reliable. They want a wardrobe with a full-size mirror and soft close drawers, not grandma's hand-me-down mahogany wardrobe that's built like a brick shihouse. This thread is also full of people complaining about IKEA products not holding up to moves, but I bet most of them would change their tune if they had to move a house full of solid wood furniture. That stuff is heavy. You can buy an old wardrobe that will barely dent when hit with a sledgehammer, but the labor cost of moving it is so high that it can be cheaper nowadays to scrap it and buy a new one from IKEA.
Mc_Big_G 6y ago
All my Ikea furniture is 15 years old and looks almost new. I even moved all of it from Ohio to SF with no issues. It's fine if you don't abuse it.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Stop buying the particleboard crap. The solid wood (often pine) pieces are so wonderfully durable and they degrade gracefully (dings and scratches rather than peeling laminate and chunks of particleboard falling out). Seriously it’s worth the added cost. You’ll all love it.
- Smithalicious 6y ago
  I concur, when people refer to bad quality ikea furniture they invariably mean the particle board stuff. Anything made of solid wood or metal has held up well for me.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  This x1000. I've owned a lot of IKEA furniture and I think it's really durable. I have a bedroom set (Hemnes) that I've hauled around to six different places over the years and it still serving well in the guest room. I never bothered to even unload the dresser full of clothes, I just wrap it up in shipping plastic and haul it on a dolly. However, even their crap can be really rugged. I have this $5 side table that I've been dragging around for a decade now that just won't die.
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    In my mind, out of every product, IKEA pricing will be e.g. - the cheapest possible one at like $5 - a pretty OK one at $20 - some really fancy ones with brass handles or sth at $40 or $80 The $5 products I bought fell apart, but the $20 ones are still perfectly fine. So I guess depending on what everyone refers to as "typical IKEA stuff", their mileage might vary by a looong shot.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Yes. Now if IKEA would stop selling the particleboard crap consumers won't have to be forced to make the right decision. I don't know, is that a crazy, overly-activist idea?
chaostheory 6y ago
Can confirm. We bought the cheap $10-$15 dining room / kitchen tables over a decade ago. They are still fine even though they still feel flimsy. Same goes for our other IKEA furniture. The only IKEA furniture I wouldn't recommend are the couches and beds.
Tarq0n 6y ago
I mean this [1] isn't really acceptable for a 500 dollar desk. https://www.btod.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ikea-idasen-surface-01.jpg https://www.btod.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ikea-id...
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Yes, that's always been partly BS. IKEA has a range of qualities of course, but let me tell you about the shitty, shitty particle board kmart? shelves my mom bought in the 70s and moved 5-10 times with over the years. Around 2005 we'd had enough and drug them into the parking lot, and did an "Office Space printer job" to them with hammers. Was cheap as hell and supported heavy books and CRT TV for thirty years. The durability being too low wasn't the problem. Maybe if you're in a refurbished hundred year old house and it deserves some dignified antiques sure, but for the rest of us IKEA is just fine. We even have a 15 year old very cheap Lack table in the corner.
monadic2 6y ago
You measure the durability of ikea furtniture in terms of the moves it can withstand. If it stays in one place it's fine.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I've found that they're good for regular people. If you have kids IKEA furniture will not survive them. The leaping, jumping, pushing around, sitting on things they shouldn't. Although that's really more of a parental failure than IKEA's

by shocks 6y ago

memsom 6y ago

It's generally great. The only thing we have that was a disaster is a wardrobe with mirrored doors. The doors are too heavy for the fittings and they basically sheared off on one side. Fixing is really hard because the door weighs too much and so is brutal on anything I've had a go at.. and being made from fibreboard, the structure is sawdust very easily. Maybe we will be able to recycle it. That would be pretty nice.

baryphonic 6y ago

Entirely agree. I've assembled loads of IKEA furniture over the years and have only rarely had quality issues. IKEA uses a lot more solid wood these days than compressed particle board, and is thus not bad. The only issue I've seen (which IKEA has attempted to remedy in its more recent iterations) is that the bottoms of some of the drawers in a chest of drawers will "bow" down under load. I've had mass-produced furniture from major brands known for quality, I've had hand-made wood furniture from NC, I've had big-box store self-assembled furniture and I've had IKEA furniture. Hand-made furniture can't be beat, but IKEA really is second best in my experience.

mauvehaus 6y ago
I build furniture professionally, and I agree. IKEA stuff has been engineered to within an inch of its life to hold up for a reasonable length of time while being made of the lightest possible materials. A lot of other factory made furniture is built starting from some vestige of traditional joinery, and then cheapened until it hits a price point. The construction is appalling. I don't expect mortise and tenon face frames, but pocket screws would be a much better solution than a couple of pneumatic nails, which do nothing to stabilize the case and can't be driven back in when they pull out under racking forces. At that point, the whole frame has to come off, and since the rest of the piece is as cheaply built, it's anybody's guess whether it'll hold together long enough to put the face frame back on. The thinness of veneers on the tops of things that look like solid wood is a crime too. Most pros do the bulk of their stripping chemically, which doesn't risk damaging the veneer, but you usually have to do at least a little sanding, and it doesn't take much to find out what lies beneath. The result is that you can refinish a piece once. Just like in software (which was my first career), doing repair/maintenance can be a real eye-opener. If you like the look of IKEA, it's generally a good compromise between cost and durability. EDIT: I should probably add that, in fairness, IKEA stuff , at least the particleboard or honeycomb cardboard stuff, is completely unrefinishable. I haven't seen any of their solid wood stuff come in for repair, but I'd take my chances on that if somebody wanted to pay me to.
crazygringo 6y ago
> IKEA uses a lot more solid wood these days than compressed particle board, and is thus not bad. I don't know what you're talking about... all the "classic" IKEA items like the BILLY bookshelf, the KALLAX (now EXPEDIT) shelves, the LACK table, the MALM chests... they're all particle board and, yes, bad quality. (Which is OK since they're cheap, that's the whole point.) Yes you've always also been able to buy solid wood stuff, like certain tables and chairs or more expensive items, but that stuff isn't replacing the classic particle-board pieces. It's not like IKEA's been moving to higher-quality stuff on the whole.
- QuercusMax 6y ago
  I think you got that backwards - it used to be EXPEDIT, but now it's KALLAX. (Source: I just bought a whole bunch of cube-shelving from IKEA - Kallax is all over, but Expedit is nowhere to be found.)

wooger 6y ago

I would add: Add a bead of your owne wood glue for all wood - wood interfaces, and you'll massively increase the rigidity & durability. Sadly nothing can help with the problem of MDF getting chipped and gouged easily when you move house.

reader_mode 6y ago

>The great think about most IKEA furniture (or more generally, wood furniture) is that you can modify/fix it when it breaks. Good luck fixing those broken welds on your metal chairs! Good luck breaking the steel beam bed frame :) Ikea furniture is not wood it's crap particleboards, cheap plastic, etc. - repairing that looks terrible. Their paint quality is crap as well - I bought a work desk that would scratch from moving a monitor on it and has wear marks from resting my hands. Same problem with kitchen table in a rental apartment - got scratched up from regular use and no way to repair it. Hinges on sliding doors would never stop correctly and scratch up the other door, loose/flimsy feeling mechanism in the first place. I do have their standing desk - it fit the home office space perfectly and it was the only good delivery option during corona lockdown - I'm happy with that so far. In general IKEA is my least favourite furniture option but sometimes they are the most practical solution.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
>Ikea furniture is not wood it's crap particleboards My kitchen table is from Ikea, it's solid wood. My Poang chair from Ikea came with a 10 year guarantee and I expect it to last longer than that. This idea that everything that comes out of Ikea is barely going to make it home is nonsense. Of course if you buy a side table for £6 then you can't expect it to last long. That isn't representative of the whole though.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  I went to IKEA when I was building a kitchen - solid wood counter top was an option but wasn't cheaper than hiring local custom kitchen company for similar materials and I had them design a metal frame arround the kitchen island in the dimensions that couldn't be done with IKEA. My point being IKEA isn't much cheaper when you account for materials and you usually get better flexibility elsewhere. IKEA is like McDonald's of furniture, there's a place for it, but like the McDonald's fancy burger options if you're going for that you'll have significantly better options for a bit more money
  - throwawasdf 6y ago

firebird84 6y ago

I would just say use a low clutch setting on your power tools and you should be safe. My lowest clutch settings are weaker than my hand tightening.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago

What is a check of draws?

MereInterest 6y ago
Probably a typo for "chest of drawers".

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

While I agree that you can justifiably write off a majority of the criticism as "a bunch of yuppies who have no business using an allen wrench complaining they assembled it wrong" there is quite a bit of validity to complaints that the wooden equivalent of a pringles chip has no business doing anything structural.

throwanem 6y ago

To your second and third points, if you have a drill/driver with a torque setting, use that and turn the torque right down before running screws into MDF. (The torque setting is the numbered collar behind the chuck on your driver, if it has one. It won't be calibrated to anything, but lower numbers mean less torque applied to the fastener before the driver stops turning it.) A low torque setting vastly reduces the hazard of splitting the MDF, or chewing up the bolt's drive socket, if you're a little careless on the trigger. Then you can hand-finish with a regular driver. I'd hesitate to use a thread locker on Ikea bolts. They're cheaply made and very mild, so it's hard enough to get them out without stripping the drive as it is; there's no way you're going to break Loctite and not end up needing to grab a bolt head with vise grips. (And that's if you break the Loctite before the drive strips. I wouldn't count on that.) At most, I'd say wait until you know there's a problem with a fastener backing out before you start thinking about gooping it up with something, and even then probably start with something less aggressive than even blue Loctite - a tiny dab of superglue, maybe.

Reason077 6y ago

> " if you use a power tool on a screw, only use it for 95% of the task. finish the job with a hand-tool or you will do damage." Or, learn how to use the torque setting properly on your electric drill / screwdriver.

rimunroe 6y ago
Not all drills have a torque limiter. As I understand it, you're more likely to find those on cordless drills than their corded brethren. I've actually never used a corded drill with a torque limiter, but most of cordless ones I've used have had them.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Corded drills seem hard to find these days. The only one I have is a couple of decades old, and I don't run fasteners with it, not least because it lacks both torque limiting and speed control. I'd expect a modern corded drill to live in the high-power contractor tool niche, like how a rotary hammer compares with a handheld hammer drill. Ikea, perhaps unsurprisingly, sells a cheap cordless driver ($20 US) with a torque limiter.
  - Spare_account 6y ago
    https://www.diy.com/departments/bosch-550w-240v-corded-hammer-drill-easyimpact-550/3165140840668_BQ.prd https://www.diy.com/departments/bosch-550w-240v-corded-hamme... Perhaps this is unusual in the US but entry-level corded drills are readily available in the UK. I don't know if this store is a good example, but this USA based store appears to stock a range of cheap corded drills: https://www.lowes.com/pl/Drills-Drills-drivers-Power-tools-Tools/4294607722?refinement=4294776950&int_cmp=DrillsDrivers%3AC%3ATools%3AMerch%3Acorded_drills_visual_taxonomy https://www.lowes.com/pl/Drills-Drills-drivers-Power-tools-T...
    - throwanem 6y ago
      I can't see the Lowes page right now, but Home Depot is a comparable retailer, and a store near me (but not the one I usually go to) looks to stock a couple of absolutely bottom-tier corded 3/8" drills, plus a broad range of light and medium corded hammer drills with 1/2" chucks. The broad niche between those, of general-purpose 3/8" and 1/2" light and medium drill/driver tools and impact drivers, looks to be pretty universally filled by cordless tools. (Which makes sense, given the razor-and-blades or inkjet-and-cartridges business model to which battery-powered tools lend themselves.) I wonder if corded drills might be more common in the UK because your higher mains voltage means less current is required for a given power output. With conversion losses, you can't realistically pull more than a horsepower out of a typical 120V/10A circuit without risking a breaker trip, even if there's nothing else connected to the circuit. That makes a corded tool potentially much more of a pain to use than a battery-powered one, so even if the corded version would otherwise be much more cost-efficient, it still may be a tougher sell in the US. I've heard the same power limitation described as a reason why electric kettles basically don't exist here, although since kitchen circuits are typically rated for higher current than most others, I suspect the absence of good electric kettles may have more to do with steeped tea having been displaced by drip coffee in Americans' morning cups.

crispyambulance 6y ago

Of course IKEA furniture lacks durability, much of it is made of that awful MDF (particle board). Simultaneously weak, heavy and extremely vulnerable to water damage, it's only advantage is that it's dimensionally accurate when new and amenable to automated cutting, milling and drilling at the factory. I guess it's good with laminate coatings as well. Another thing about IKEA is that if you got an old house with wide baseboards and not-quite-square walls, floors and ceilings, it's hard to make stuff like cabinets, bookshelves and counters mount properly. IKEA appears to be optimized for modern construction. Much better to just get high-quality plywood cabinets, you won't have to worry about destroying it by using normal tools. It's also lighter and you will swear less and be done sooner. Even better, hire a carpenter to install good stuff.

Retric 6y ago
IKEA has different product lines at different price points. They give the option of going with particle board, but spend more money and you get much longer lasting furniture. Realistically, for people that move around a lot having a very cheap option to fit each living space is just efficient. Particleboard is effectively a form of wood recycling so using it is surprisingly environmentally friendly even if doesn’t last very long. However, once you buy a place it’s time to get something that lasts.
BillinghamJ 6y ago
I think they generally do a lot more plywood than MDF. But ultimately depends on the price points - they do sell pieces of fairly large furniture for <£10, and indeed they're not going to be super high end.

delecti 6y ago

In my experience, IKEA furniture is a fantastic value, and has great durability, unless/until you disassemble it. If you never disassemble it then it'll stay solid for long past the point where you've gotten your money's worth. IME that's true even having exclusively used the tools that came with the pieces, and never using any additional steps (power tools, glue, loctite, etc.). If you disassemble it, it immediately starts feeling like you got what you paid for.

vollmond 6y ago
Even disassembling... what are people doing? I have moved several times with IKEA furniture I had to disassemble (including a big 5x5 Expedit), and it's all been fine...
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  Disassembled bed... it was never the same. My issue with IKEA is most of the furniture is not solid wood but chipboard, screws just don't hold well in it. Some of their products handle repeated putting apart and together fine, some don't. Sometimes people mess up with complex pieces of furniture. I wouldn't blame IKEA specifically, any chipboard furniture would be prone to this.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >My issue with IKEA is most of the furniture is not solid wood but chipboard They sell lots of both. If you're buying a $10 coffee table, yes, it's going to be particle board. I feel like people are missing the core of ikea: it's well priced, stylish furniture that you can move into your condo or apartment easily.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      We have a double bed from chipwood that costed +-1000USD with mattress and bed slats. Slats and mattress are fine (which is expected after roughly only 4 years), but bed frame... overpriced for what it is. Will go for solid massive wood which can be found cheaper where we live. At that time there wasn't basically anything in IKEA from solid wood. So some IKEA stuff is well priced, some isn't. Some is great value for the money, some definitely isn't. Some styles are plain ugly as fk to us, some they nail pretty well for the price. I think its called hit-and-miss situation. Their kitchens are great value generally - not top notch by any means, but at given price even professionals tend to agree they are the best. If you want something better, prepare 2-3x the price. And since you never move kitchen, most complains mentioned before don't apply.

Sileni 6y ago

Agreed. Those little Lack tables are sturdy enough that they're often used as a cheap rack mounts by guitarists. Iirc they're almost perfectly a 1U width and depth, for anyone looking into a home lab. Add a couple of corner brackets and a layer of sealer and they'll take an outrageous beating. That said, a benefit to the lack(heh) of quality is how light everything is. I do a lot of projects that require using my entire living space. If it wasn't so easy to just shove the furniture out of the way, I'd have that much more inertia between me and doing what I want.

DrOctagon 6y ago
They're also popular among the hobbyist 3d printing community. Buy two, stack them on top of each other, then use Plexiglas sheets (or similar) between the legs of the top one and you have a cheap solution for enclosing a 3d printer.

deleted 6y ago

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crazygringo 6y ago

Most people aren't complaining about it if it stays in one spot. The issue is mainly when moving between apartments/houses. All the shifting weight and jostling in the truck simply weakens things too much. It's also not meant to be disassembled, and the particle board easily gets really banged up because it's so soft. And all this is even when trying to protect it with covering pads. (And sadly, none of your tips are going to help either -- fasteners simply pull themselves out of the soft particle board, because the board itself is weaker than the fastener/glue.) A Billy bookshelf or Kallax shelving unit will hopefully survive a single move, especially if you can tighten/glue things further after it's been moved. But once you're talking 2-3 moves, forget it. For that reason, for young professionals who move apartments every couple years in their 20's, it often makes more sense to just leave/toss their IKEA shelves/cubbies/units, and buy new pieces for the new place. It isn't durable across moves. (Obviously I'm talking about "classic" IKEA particle board flat-pack stuff. If you're buying a solid wood table or metal lamp from IKEA then it'll be fine, but that's not what most people are thinking about when they think of IKEA furniture.)

mitchdoogle 6y ago
Ikea furniture and any flat pack furniture can usually be taken apart just fine. Just reverse the instructions. I've done it multiple times, especially when I had to fit a desk with a hutch in the back seat of my sedan. I guess for most people, it's just not worth the time to take apart all their furniture at once
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I guess your experience is different from mine. A lot of IKEA stuff I've bought involves one-way assembly -- pounding things together with a mallet. See the EKET cabinets for example. If you reverse it by naively prying them apart, it'll strip the wood. Or take the backing to any BILLY bookshelf -- it's held in place with ~30 tiny nails. It's virtually impossible to pry the backing and nails off without destroying the backing in the process. Etc. etc. Yes, some of the pieces can be disassembled, if the assembly consists entirely of cam locks, dowels and screws. But it's certainly not designed for it.

m463 6y ago

I agree. I've found the driver torque dial to be inadequate most of the time. I'm reminded of the idea of "mechanic's feel" from "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's when you develop a sense for tightening a screw or bolt for snugness without destroying the threads, the head or the material. It's hard to do that with an electric driver in the way. (one exception might be the gyro drivers) And with respect to wood glue - I think it's worth the effort to add it to the mix with the non-metal furniture. Not only does it make the furniture more solid feeling, it also helps prevent the screws from loosening.

libraryatnight 6y ago

The desk I'm using right now is hacked together Ikea pieces and it's worked for me for about 10 years (It's the Expedit desk attachment that we expanded). It's really one of only a few Ikea bits left since my wife and I got together. Ikea made it possible to furnish our home at the time, and as we've stabilized and our careers grown, we've replaced the Ikea items with nicer things. I have no ill will toward Ikea, and while they do not make furniture you'll put in your will, they enable a lot of people to have decent things at a decent price.

0xffff2 6y ago

>you're really not going to disassemble that coffee table or small check of draws, so just use a bit of wood glue Speak for yourself. I just finished a long distance move, and I absolutely took all of my Ikea furniture apart. I'm on about year 3 of my current set of Ikea furniture, and so far it's all holding up fine. I pretty much just followed the directions, and used a power drill (with appropriate torque settings) for pretty much everything.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
I feel like there was a time when 30 years would be considered nothing for furniture durability. Heck, generations passed furniture down....
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  You can still get that kind of furniture if you want it. It just costs a couple of orders of magnitude more than even "expensive" Ikea furniture. It seems very plausible to me that there was plenty of crappy (probably homemade) furniture that wasn't any better than Ikea historically. Heirloom quality furniture takes real skill, time and materials to make. I can't imagine that the average pre-Ikea family would have been able to afford for all of their furniture to be of that quality. Not being any kind of historian, I have no idea how they filled that gap.
  - avar 6y ago
    It doesn't cost a lot, in fact you can often get it for free. This EconTalk episode is a good reference: https://www.econtalk.org/adam-minter-on-secondhand/ https://www.econtalk.org/adam-minter-on-secondhand/ The problem is that people by and large don't want solid and reliable. They want a wardrobe with a full-size mirror and soft close drawers, not grandma's hand-me-down mahogany wardrobe that's built like a brick shihouse. This thread is also full of people complaining about IKEA products not holding up to moves, but I bet most of them would change their tune if they had to move a house full of solid wood furniture. That stuff is heavy. You can buy an old wardrobe that will barely dent when hit with a sledgehammer, but the labor cost of moving it is so high that it can be cheaper nowadays to scrap it and buy a new one from IKEA.

Mc_Big_G 6y ago

All my Ikea furniture is 15 years old and looks almost new. I even moved all of it from Ohio to SF with no issues. It's fine if you don't abuse it.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Stop buying the particleboard crap. The solid wood (often pine) pieces are so wonderfully durable and they degrade gracefully (dings and scratches rather than peeling laminate and chunks of particleboard falling out). Seriously it’s worth the added cost. You’ll all love it.

Smithalicious 6y ago
I concur, when people refer to bad quality ikea furniture they invariably mean the particle board stuff. Anything made of solid wood or metal has held up well for me.
mywittyname 6y ago
This x1000. I've owned a lot of IKEA furniture and I think it's really durable. I have a bedroom set (Hemnes) that I've hauled around to six different places over the years and it still serving well in the guest room. I never bothered to even unload the dresser full of clothes, I just wrap it up in shipping plastic and haul it on a dolly. However, even their crap can be really rugged. I have this $5 side table that I've been dragging around for a decade now that just won't die.
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  In my mind, out of every product, IKEA pricing will be e.g. - the cheapest possible one at like $5 - a pretty OK one at $20 - some really fancy ones with brass handles or sth at $40 or $80 The $5 products I bought fell apart, but the $20 ones are still perfectly fine. So I guess depending on what everyone refers to as "typical IKEA stuff", their mileage might vary by a looong shot.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Yes. Now if IKEA would stop selling the particleboard crap consumers won't have to be forced to make the right decision. I don't know, is that a crazy, overly-activist idea?

chaostheory 6y ago

Can confirm. We bought the cheap $10-$15 dining room / kitchen tables over a decade ago. They are still fine even though they still feel flimsy. Same goes for our other IKEA furniture. The only IKEA furniture I wouldn't recommend are the couches and beds.

Tarq0n 6y ago

I mean this [1] isn't really acceptable for a 500 dollar desk. https://www.btod.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ikea-idasen-surface-01.jpg https://www.btod.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ikea-id...

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Yes, that's always been partly BS. IKEA has a range of qualities of course, but let me tell you about the shitty, shitty particle board kmart? shelves my mom bought in the 70s and moved 5-10 times with over the years. Around 2005 we'd had enough and drug them into the parking lot, and did an "Office Space printer job" to them with hammers. Was cheap as hell and supported heavy books and CRT TV for thirty years. The durability being too low wasn't the problem. Maybe if you're in a refurbished hundred year old house and it deserves some dignified antiques sure, but for the rest of us IKEA is just fine. We even have a 15 year old very cheap Lack table in the corner.

monadic2 6y ago

You measure the durability of ikea furtniture in terms of the moves it can withstand. If it stays in one place it's fine.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I've found that they're good for regular people. If you have kids IKEA furniture will not survive them. The leaping, jumping, pushing around, sitting on things they shouldn't. Although that's really more of a parental failure than IKEA's