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When searching for new bookshelves, I was surprised to find there was not much correspondence between price and build quality. The $150 Kallax bookshelves from

When searching for new bookshelves, I was surprised to find there was not much correspondence between price and build quality. The $150 Kallax bookshelves from IKEA were made out of the same material as some $2700 Room & Board bookshelves I also liked: both were medium density fiberboard with a wood veneer. Maybe someone prefers the design of the R&B bookshelf, or maybe they like their choice of veneer better, but fundamentally these are very similar products with an 1800% price difference. I suppose another thing you're buying is the notion of "Not IKEA", the sort of brand identification that is a luxury for certain kinds of people.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I've settled on just getting Ikea or used (and usually quite old) furniture for most things. To get consistently-better quality than Ikea, you have to go up to like 10x or more their price. There's a whole middle-range of furniture that's largely complete shit, as bad or (more often) worse than Ikea, but with massive mark-up. The market's super-weird.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I recommend being cautious. We recently bought a couple Hemnes dressers, which are solid wood mid-range furniture from Ikea. They're trash. Nobody expects Ikea furniture to be great, but usually it's just cheap materials that assembly nicely but aren't necessarily that durable. In this case, the wood was mostly okay, though several pieces were slightly warped, and after it was all put together more than half the drawers jam. Something is very wrong with their manufacturing tolerances.
  - vsskanth 4y ago
    It’s hard to believe but the walker edison brand of furniture sold online actually has solid wood options and is cheaper with better tolerances than ikea. Ikea tolerances are indeed trash. I have the same hemnes dresser
rootusrootus 4y ago
Not that it matters, but Kallax isn't MDF. It's much lighter than that. Which is for the best, because MDF at those dimensions would weigh a ton. It's constructed just like a Lack table, which is essentially cardboard honeycomb between sheets of melamine. Mostly air.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  These ikea pieces are great because you can hack them with other things and get something useful out of them.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Thank god for that design. Moving ikea stuff around is a breeze.
- zihotki 4y ago
  It is mdf, very thin 3mm mdf on the sides with paper-like honeycomb inside. Plus enforced by pieces of chipboard in the high stress areas. That's why Ikea furniture is so light.
taude 4y ago
I don't believe there's anyway that the paper-Ikea stuff was the same quality of the $2700 R&B bookshelf. Do you have any links? Having owned a lot of throwaway Ikea furniture in the past, I was pretty happy with some of my more recent R&B purchases and the quality is completely a different level (and from what I heard R&B that is getting less quality over the years), but it was still night and day better than the Ikea stuff I had.
jerf 4y ago
This is the part that annoys me, and has even prevented me from spending money at all. That cheap stuff exists, hey, there's a place for that. But then the expensive stuff is still garbage. Per a sibling comment, maybe it's different garbage of a higher quality, but garbage. I particularly remember standing in a lighting store, looking to replace the piece of garbage that we accidentally bought and put over our kitchen table, and realizing that no matter how much I spent, it would all die in a year. Fancy LED strip lighting? Unmaintainable, unrepairable, unreplaceable. So I bought a $25 extension cord with some light sockets on it and 5 LED bulbs and wrapped it around the old track. I would have spent maybe a grand on a light setup I could trust, but I trust nothing anymore. I've replaced 2 of them so far. 30 seconds, $5-ish. It's a hack, but it works. I'm in the same place for furniture at this point. My expensive couch is breaking up years before I think it should and I'm not dropping another several grand on replacing it when I'm aware of no way to trust anyone at this point. I don't know what we are going to do, but it probably doesn't involve giving this industry any money.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Why would you need to repair LED strip lighting? LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit, or at least not one measured in months. And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it. The individual LEDs are usually very easy to get access to.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    It may be that you’re talking about LED strip meaning “flexible PCB with LEDs on it’s surface”, but OP is meaning “strip of LEDs permanently glued in to a larger piece”
  - jerf 4y ago
    "LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit" So the theory goes. The reality does not agree. "And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it" That is not repairable. Some of the ones I was looking at were so fancy that I wouldn't even guarantee that you could get them back together if you did take them apart, though. Wouldn't take much for those delicate plastic bits to break permanently.
bonoboTP 4y ago
Kallax is ridiculously expensive and you pay for the hip IKEA brand (yes, IKEA is fancy in many regards). Especially for a bookshelf, you can build it yourself way cheaper. Go to IKEA to get inspiration and to check how the fiberboards are put together to construct the furniture. Then you can go to a hardware store that sells fiberboards, cut to your size specifications. In many places you can ask them to cover specific edges too. You buy the screws, the door hinges etc. A bookshelf is essentially four boards plus a few shelves themselves. Ridiculously easy to construct yourself out of boards and won't cost as much as a Kallax. Also IKEA is often not even using fiberboard but hollow cardboard like this https://www.ikea.com/de/de/images/products/lack-couchtisch-weiss__1083778_pe859098_s5.jpg?f=xl https://www.ikea.com/de/de/images/products/lack-couchtisch-w... Once you get some routine, it's no huge deal to build more stuff yourself. With my dad, we built all our kitchen furniture with MDF boards, 3D modeled in the SketchUp software by us for millimeter precision. And again, you can ask hardware shops to do a lot of stuff for you, like make curved cuts etc. Couches are of course another deal totally. But shelves/cupboards/wardrobes are totally possible to build yourself.
dirtyid 4y ago
Pretty much. Cheap engineered wood replacing increasingly expensive solid/hard wood that's not sustainable to harvest. I do notice the occasional better finish on 10x priced furniture, but seems like there's only so much wrapping veneers around particle board can be improved. Big fan of Ikea bringing cost down on steel furniture though.

yamtaddle 4y ago

I've settled on just getting Ikea or used (and usually quite old) furniture for most things. To get consistently-better quality than Ikea, you have to go up to like 10x or more their price. There's a whole middle-range of furniture that's largely complete shit, as bad or (more often) worse than Ikea, but with massive mark-up. The market's super-weird.

rootusrootus 4y ago
I recommend being cautious. We recently bought a couple Hemnes dressers, which are solid wood mid-range furniture from Ikea. They're trash. Nobody expects Ikea furniture to be great, but usually it's just cheap materials that assembly nicely but aren't necessarily that durable. In this case, the wood was mostly okay, though several pieces were slightly warped, and after it was all put together more than half the drawers jam. Something is very wrong with their manufacturing tolerances.
- vsskanth 4y ago
  It’s hard to believe but the walker edison brand of furniture sold online actually has solid wood options and is cheaper with better tolerances than ikea. Ikea tolerances are indeed trash. I have the same hemnes dresser

rootusrootus 4y ago

Not that it matters, but Kallax isn't MDF. It's much lighter than that. Which is for the best, because MDF at those dimensions would weigh a ton. It's constructed just like a Lack table, which is essentially cardboard honeycomb between sheets of melamine. Mostly air.

theGnuMe 4y ago
These ikea pieces are great because you can hack them with other things and get something useful out of them.
Gigachad 4y ago
Thank god for that design. Moving ikea stuff around is a breeze.
zihotki 4y ago
It is mdf, very thin 3mm mdf on the sides with paper-like honeycomb inside. Plus enforced by pieces of chipboard in the high stress areas. That's why Ikea furniture is so light.

taude 4y ago

I don't believe there's anyway that the paper-Ikea stuff was the same quality of the $2700 R&B bookshelf. Do you have any links? Having owned a lot of throwaway Ikea furniture in the past, I was pretty happy with some of my more recent R&B purchases and the quality is completely a different level (and from what I heard R&B that is getting less quality over the years), but it was still night and day better than the Ikea stuff I had.

jerf 4y ago

This is the part that annoys me, and has even prevented me from spending money at all. That cheap stuff exists, hey, there's a place for that. But then the expensive stuff is still garbage. Per a sibling comment, maybe it's different garbage of a higher quality, but garbage. I particularly remember standing in a lighting store, looking to replace the piece of garbage that we accidentally bought and put over our kitchen table, and realizing that no matter how much I spent, it would all die in a year. Fancy LED strip lighting? Unmaintainable, unrepairable, unreplaceable. So I bought a $25 extension cord with some light sockets on it and 5 LED bulbs and wrapped it around the old track. I would have spent maybe a grand on a light setup I could trust, but I trust nothing anymore. I've replaced 2 of them so far. 30 seconds, $5-ish. It's a hack, but it works. I'm in the same place for furniture at this point. My expensive couch is breaking up years before I think it should and I'm not dropping another several grand on replacing it when I'm aware of no way to trust anyone at this point. I don't know what we are going to do, but it probably doesn't involve giving this industry any money.

midoridensha 4y ago
Why would you need to repair LED strip lighting? LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit, or at least not one measured in months. And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it. The individual LEDs are usually very easy to get access to.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  It may be that you’re talking about LED strip meaning “flexible PCB with LEDs on it’s surface”, but OP is meaning “strip of LEDs permanently glued in to a larger piece”
- jerf 4y ago
  "LEDs don't normally have a lifespan limit" So the theory goes. The reality does not agree. "And all the LED lighting I've ever seen is repairable; you just need a soldering iron to do it" That is not repairable. Some of the ones I was looking at were so fancy that I wouldn't even guarantee that you could get them back together if you did take them apart, though. Wouldn't take much for those delicate plastic bits to break permanently.

bonoboTP 4y ago

Kallax is ridiculously expensive and you pay for the hip IKEA brand (yes, IKEA is fancy in many regards). Especially for a bookshelf, you can build it yourself way cheaper. Go to IKEA to get inspiration and to check how the fiberboards are put together to construct the furniture. Then you can go to a hardware store that sells fiberboards, cut to your size specifications. In many places you can ask them to cover specific edges too. You buy the screws, the door hinges etc. A bookshelf is essentially four boards plus a few shelves themselves. Ridiculously easy to construct yourself out of boards and won't cost as much as a Kallax. Also IKEA is often not even using fiberboard but hollow cardboard like this https://www.ikea.com/de/de/images/products/lack-couchtisch-weiss__1083778_pe859098_s5.jpg?f=xl https://www.ikea.com/de/de/images/products/lack-couchtisch-w... Once you get some routine, it's no huge deal to build more stuff yourself. With my dad, we built all our kitchen furniture with MDF boards, 3D modeled in the SketchUp software by us for millimeter precision. And again, you can ask hardware shops to do a lot of stuff for you, like make curved cuts etc. Couches are of course another deal totally. But shelves/cupboards/wardrobes are totally possible to build yourself.

dirtyid 4y ago

Pretty much. Cheap engineered wood replacing increasingly expensive solid/hard wood that's not sustainable to harvest. I do notice the occasional better finish on 10x priced furniture, but seems like there's only so much wrapping veneers around particle board can be improved. Big fan of Ikea bringing cost down on steel furniture though.