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Legs and knobs for IKEA and other furniture
- samwillis 3y agoWe've use them, a great way to "elevate" your IKEA furniture. Another good one doing IKEA compatible furniture parts is Superfront: https://superfront.com/ https://superfront.com/. We use them for a bathroom cabinet in our last house. Also take a look at Plykea for inspiration on what you can do with IKEA kitchen carcasses with custom fronts/sides/fillers: https://www.plykea.com/ https://www.plykea.com/ During Covid my wife and I took six weeks off to refit our kitchen ourselves. IKEA carcasses, a lot of Baltic Birch plywood - all cut and finished ourselves - and half the fronts from uk company https://www.nakedkitchens.com/ https://www.nakedkitchens.com/. It was a lot of fun, no one has a kitchen like ours, and all in it was under £6k for something that would have probably been closer to £40k if we had gone to a local bespoke kitchen company.
- throwaway892238 3y agoFrom the Plykea website: "we prefer to celebrate the beauty of the plywood edges" Am I missing something? Did they seal them with epoxy? Because plywood edges are notorious for taking in water and turning it into a swelling, rotting, falling-apart mess. If I'm making a counter top or low kitchen cabinet, I'm using solid wood or an alternative (preferably of whatever's at the local reclaimed building materials store) For those into DIY, if you're going to remodel an entire kitchen, it's not hard to make your own wood faces of any size. You do need to buy a few tools, but they're tools you can keep using for decades. A circular saw, some pipe clamps and pipes, wood glue, a saw track, sandpaper + sanding block, and lots of 2x4s, are enough to make anything from dining tables to doors to kitchen counter tops to cabinet doors.
- operatingthetan 3y agoSee Kerf for a cabinet maker that uses a lot of europly/appleply with exposed edges: https://www.instagram.com/kerfdesign https://www.instagram.com/kerfdesign
- JKCalhoun 3y agoJapanese DIY speaker-builders love the exposed ply-edge thing. Maybe a sign of the times we live in when a multi-ply plywood means quality (as opposed to particle board, low-ply construction plywood ... OSB?)
- samwillis 3y agoWe went exposed edges, and finished with Osmo (https://osmouk.com/ https://osmouk.com/) works really well. It's not like it's being rained on like outside, if your cabinets are getting wet enough for that to happen the chipboard carcasses with blow out first. Baltic birch also tends to use an exterior grade adhesive for gluing the layers together. 100% agree on the tools, I brought a track saw for the project. First time using one, they are brilliant, and no need to get an expensive Festool. I got this one (https://www.screwfix.com/p/erbauer-erb690csw-185mm-electric-plunge-saw-240v/3875p https://www.screwfix.com/p/erbauer-erb690csw-185mm-electric-...) and it's perfect for the job.
- el_benhameen 3y agoI can see the tracksaw being useful for breaking 4x8 plywood panels down to door size, but did you end up using a table saw for shorter cuts?
- throwaway892238 3y agoMaybe it's because I work on so many slapped-together projects, but I barely use my table saw anymore. Instead I use my cordless circular and a reference, usually my speed square. If I don't need too much precision I just hold the short piece and square in one hand, lean it against the corner of my deck, and cut. Other times i'll grab some squeeze clamps and scrap wood, make a quick fence/jig on a table, and cut against that. It's just so much faster than setting up the table saw outside (I don't have a woodworking bench). If I have to make a bunch of cuts in succession I might use the table saw, or again I might use the circular. I've been too lazy to build a crosscut sled; if I had one I'd use the table more often.
- lagniappe 3y agoIf you're ripping down 4x8's, I've noticed that using a piece of foam insulation on the concrete is the perfect size
- donutshop 3y agoOsmo oil is the best. Highly recommend it as well.
- majormajor 3y agoI haven't looked at the Plykea stuff in detail but clear seals on everything seems to be the standard these days even for "natural" looking finishes. For large enough cabinet doors where you want a flat, flush, uniform look, plywood gives you dimensional stability which is a big deal. Also seems to be common. I'd band the edges in most cases though vs painting or such. Especially if you're DIYing, cause depending on just what level of fit and finish you want, you're gonna have a hard time getting things perfectly square, perfectly flush with most wood you'll be able to buy, without getting into jointers and planers and other fun stuff. It's easy to do "pretty good" and very very hard to do "very good" without either a significant investment in tools or time or both.
- blagie 3y agoPlywood edges, nicely finished, with a clear seal, can be beautiful in some contexts. That said, they're ugly, noisy, and distracting in *most* contexts I've seen them used. It takes a good designer to make them beautiful.
- leonhard 3y agoWould love to see a photo of the final outcome!
- porker 3y agoSeconded!
- brnt 3y agoHere in Europe there are dozens, probably more, of companies selling IKEA fronts and handles. Buy, as always, the major expensive is labour, not materials.
- FailMore 3y agoAbout to do my kitchen too
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoSeen of lot of these, might be a good idea for IKEA to start launching limited exclusives with designers so clients can also get it from them.
- bdcravens 3y agoLooks like Superfront doesn't ship many of their products to the US. Bummer.
- bigtex 3y agoKnow of anyone who provides custom rails for IKEA drawers? Eventually they fail and ball bearing start to fall out and they do not sell replacements.
- mhb 3y agoSeems fine, but how is this different than what any hardware store sells? Is there some unique size of screw or something with Ikea furniture?
- jws 3y agoIn the US you are unlikely to get metric threaded legs at a local hardware store. But yeah, knobs are knobs. From time to time I help assemble scores of tiny Ikea dressers for a charity. About 1 in 6 ends up needing rework because something is either machined poorly or breaks during assembly. The most common failure is split knobs, so I bring a sack of fun hand painted knobs off of Amazon and give the top drawers "accent knobs" on enough units to complete the assembly run. I'm told the accent drawer units are very popular with the end recipients.
- bdcravens 3y agoMost of my Ikea stuff I end up customizing in some way. Got a giant toy box drawer - cut a big hole in it and it's a perfect litter box enclosure. Hung a Kallax on the wall, and used my own brackets to line up with the studs. Have Besta cabinets in my kitchen and living room, and used my own hardware.
- dhosek 3y agoMy wife bought a set of painted knobs to replace the default ones on the dresser that we got for the kids’ room. It was an inexpensive way to make the dresser just a little more unique.
- crazygringo 3y agoThis is just an e-commerce site for furniture parts. This is not HN material -- it's just an ad, essentially. It should be flagged.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoRelax, it's the weekend, and it's an interesting hack. Just a couple of weeks ago I tacked on optional legs under a cabinet (all IKEA material, hadn't used them initially), and I like to see there are alternatives.
- sprior 3y agoI actually took it not as an ad but as a case study in a creative business idea.
- jononomo 3y agoI guess I enjoyed this ad and felt a little inspired.
- bdcravens 3y agoSuper interesting to me. I think a lot of developers like the Ikea aesthetic. Definitely far more interesting than the deluge of crypto and AI articles.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- telebell 3y agoAny other resources like these to recommend? I’m newly into woodworking and can now make a mean tabletop, but my joinery is much more rudimentary. Would be nice to be able to make nice looking gifts for people earlier in the learning process.
- notatoad 3y agoIs it just me, or is it really hard to focus on anything on this website? I can't pick out a specific reason for it, but looking at it feels chaotic, like my eyes are being drawn to a dozen things at once
- mszcz 3y agoMaybe it's one of those ChatGPT designed and operated businesses everyone's been dreaming about recently? ;)
- onli 3y agoThere is a design issue with the titles. They are placed on top of images, but with no background and without selecting the images in a way that they cant clash. On some parts of the images it is then white on white or black on black. Not sure it's only that, but it won't help.
- smhg 3y agoYou can also attempt to do this within IKEA. You can sometimes buy bed/sofa/... legs separately and use ones from other series and furniture. Sometimes they are quite different, or at least fit your style better than the default ones.
- johnwalkr 3y agoThey sell various knobs and handles too, at least in Europe, next to the returns/damaged sales section.
- sourcecodeplz 3y agoThere is no worse quality furniture than IKEA. There is no real wood, just sawdust and glue. It just "looks" nice. But even those looks don't compare with the shine of real wood.
- cinntaile 3y agoMost ikea stuff has a very good price quality ratio so that's not true. It also isn't true that they don't use real wood, it depends on what you buy.
- switch007 3y agoAre you talking about current pricing? They’ve jacked up a lot of items 20-30% the past couple of years on top of reducing quality
- cinntaile 3y agoThat's a fair point and a trend I have definitely noticed as well. The price quality ratio isn't what it used. The founder died 5 years ago, I wonder if it's related. He was a notorious penny pincher.
- gommm 3y agoIt also depends on the region. Here in HK, Ikea is very expensive (about double the price I used to see in France), to the point where it's cheaper to get a wardrobe custom made in good quality plywood exactly according to our dimensions than to buy a wardrobe that's close to the dimensions we need in Ikea.
- johnwalkr 3y agoIn Japan it was the only place I found with good reasonably priced furniture, especially for larger sofas and beds. Nitori was good quality but a bit more expensive and everything was low and small. Besides that, there seemed to be absolute junk for low prices and high end handmade stuff for very high prices. I simply wasn’t anywhere else with stuff in the midrange. Now I love close to France and Ikea is definitely the best value for midrange. Some of the German chains are pretty good too (but still 30% more comparing similar quality).
- mekkkkkk 3y agoI like the idea of IKEA furniture being frames for further customization. Since their furniture is so ubiquitous, it's like a common touch point for modders and DIY'ers. I've used Bemz[0] custom upholstery for their couches before. A nice way to mix it up and refresh your living room without replacing the entire thing. Can recommend. [0] https://bemz.com/ https://bemz.com/
- vineyardmike 3y agoDo you not find the couches’ structures get loose before the fabric falls apart? That’s been my experience at least.