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Another lesson of Ikea is that often you cannot move them from one home/apartment to another, because if you try to take it apart and then reassemble it, it's n

Another lesson of Ikea is that often you cannot move them from one home/apartment to another, because if you try to take it apart and then reassemble it, it's never the same. To extend this via analogy to the software realm, a deep refactoring is problematic whereas OTOH a complete rewrite is a better idea. Which has not borne borne out by industry experience.

atoav 3y ago
I moved a ikea shelve through 3 flats and two nations. Ultimately I gifted it away because the new space wouldn't fit it and my requirements had changed, but I know people who are in the 5th flat. As long as you are treating the stuff right it should survive a few assembly-disassembly-cycles. Key is of couese to sort the screws, mark the parts with tape, etc.
- belval 3y ago
  Anecdotally I have had trouble reconciling this seemingly prevalent "you can't disassemble Ikea furniture" with my own experience. It's not made for it sure but bookshelves, bed frames and tables can all be reassembled reasonably well. Anything smaller you can just put in the truck when moving.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Again one of those impossible to kill memes, along with bad mounting instructions (they are on par with Lego, and way better than a lot of industry ones). Usually tells you more about the person making that point than about the point they try to make.
    - gxs 3y ago
      Anyone who’s ever finished putting together a piece of IKEA furniture only to realize they missed a few parts knows you can take it apart and put it back together perfectly fine.
    - watwut 3y ago
      IKEA instructions are the best instructions there exist, imo. You can consistently follow the steps. We had much worst experience with instructions feom other shops.
    - Swizec 3y ago
      > along with bad mounting instructions (they are on par with Lego, and way better than a lot of industry ones After reading Visual Thinking, I think this is a different brains problem. Some people just aren’t able to object visualize and need written step by step instructions. We tested this with my girlfriend using a LEGO set. In the time I blazed through 5 bags of Lego, she barely managed to get 1 assembled. Because she just struggles with visual instruction and manipulating objects in her mind. The opposite happens with sequential written instructions. I struggle to follow simple recipes without pictures and have to re-read the same step multiple times to get what they’re saying, whereas she can blaze through no problem and doesn’t understand why I’m struggling.
    - mejutoco 3y ago
      IMO Lego are the gold standard of instructions. From what a remember, IKEA also does labeled bags with a small subset of pieces. While I think IKEA instructions are clear enough, they feel frustrating at times, while Lego feels very satisfying. Maybe it is the full color of the Lego instructions, or that the consequences of a mistake are easier to undo? Or the lego units make it easier to count the distances. Or maybe my love of Lego is stronger than the often chore of assembling furniture, in a pavlovian way? :)
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Well, to me, the furniture quality is meh, and they're quite fragile, but instructions are indeed good enough - and miles better than competition. One thing I specifically appreciate about IKEA instructions is the attention to detail in the drawings. With almost every IKEA purchase, at some point I hit a moment where some elements can be mated in several orientations, and there isn't an obvious way to tell which is the correct one. Sometimes it's apparent if you look couple steps ahead, but I found that you can always find a clue somewhere in the drawing of the unclear step. It's usually something like one of the elements having asymmetrically sized or arranged holes, which translates to a difference of 0.25mm to 1mm between some dots on the paper drawing. It's tiny, but it's always there, corresponding precisely to the piece I have in front of me. Of course, this could've been done better in many ways, but at least they care about precision of their drawings. Of companies in this space I had experience with, no one else does.
  - mortenjorck 3y ago
    I think a big reason for this reputation is that IKEA is one of the few furniture brands big enough to have a wider-than-normal range of product tiers. Most brands have only one or two that are typically close together, while IKEA has at least three covering a much broader range of manufacturing methods and materials. And while you can get lucky with products in the lowest tier (I have some 15-year-old seating that fits this mold), often you do need to step up to at least the mid-tier to get something that will make it unscathed through moves.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    For bookshelves in particular (and wardrobes which have it too), I've found that trying to remove the nailed-in particleboard from the back usually goes really poorly. For furniture that doesn't have that, I agree with you.
    - ce4 3y ago
      The trick is to use screws from the start and throw away the nails. Also make notes on the back, to mark what part goes where and in what direction. And lastly, have a 90° gage to make sure all corners have right angles. This is very crucial. Sometimes floors are uneven and trick you into assembling the furniture askewed
Hikikomori 3y ago
Why take them apart? Just move them like regular furniture.
- cuchoi 3y ago
  Sometimes they just don't fit elevators / stairs :)
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    You just don't have a big enough hammer...
  - iso1631 3y ago
    You just need to pivot
- pixl97 3y ago
  Depending on the piece they may not survive the structural stresses, especially the lower end models.
  - iso1631 3y ago
    I've never had a piece of ikea equipment where that applies, I'm typing this on my ikea desk from 2011, next to a 2x2 kallax and another 2x4 kallax that have moved 5 and 3 times respectively.
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      Well, kallax 2x4 is still a rather light piece of furniture and there's not much need to disassemble it. This need grows with size/weight - e.g. couches, large wardrobes (Pax) etc.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        OTOH, I have a 4x4 Kallax that's barely been moved between the rooms couple times in the last few years, and it's already getting wobbly enough that I'm afraid to put much weight on it; it's another of my IKEA furniture pieces that'll end up reinforced with metal angle brackets.
voz_ 3y ago
A rewrite is almost never the right choice.
- pphysch 3y ago
  I much prefer a SWE culture that embraces iterative development, where "rewrites" and migrations are not feared and can be done safely and efficiently because care was taken during the design process to identify ontologies and system boundaries. Yes, the MVP takes a bit longer as a result. If you don't iterate, and you push what is essentially v0.1.0 to production, you reinforce a culture where deleting code is sin and the concept of iteration ("rewriting") is foreign. http://www.laputan.org/mud/ http://www.laputan.org/mud/
  - makapuf 3y ago
    I think of it as: a whole rewrite is never the answer so don't start one, a gradual one always is, so plan for it.
- kevincox 3y ago
  If you have well defined components it is often reasonable to rewrite them. Rewriting an entire project is likely a mistake. I think the mistake is generally the size. If you lock up half of the team and have them rewrite for 2 years then you are likely going to have time. If you slice off components that can be rewritten by a few team members in a couple of weeks you can likely get a good quality result.
  - voz_ 3y ago
    No lol, not on anything worth working on. Maybe on something small or with no real users.
HPsquared 3y ago
As long as you don't remove any of the "wood screw" elements (edit: that is, the screws used in the cam locks), they're perfectly ok to disassemble. They won't go as flat as the original box, but you can certainly transport them in pieces (with care).
watwut 3y ago
We moved our ikea furniture and it still works.
naet 3y ago
I have moved many times with Ikea furniture and purchased it used with no problems. Ikea furniture is some of the most disassemble and reassemble-able furniture I've seen.
- ng12 3y ago
  Yeah, I live in New York and the professional movers have made an artform of quickly disassembling and reassembling IKEA furniture.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Would relate to this. Even with normal wear and tear, reassembly isn't a problem. Perhaps the difference stems from how rushed/impatient one was during initial assembly. I do know a couple pieces where that happened and it resulted in wonky furniture because this knob was jammed in or that bit was misaligned for months. Would make sense considering a lot of people feel excited after purchasing it that they don't take their time with assembly. This is mostly for the older pieces, I know a lot of them now you have to really mess up for it to affect future reassembly.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  Taking it down and re-assembling it honestly makes it last longer. If you start moving a structure made of a bunch of non-ridged squares, you're going to widen every hole and loosen every screw.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MisterTea 3y ago
  The particle/flake board stuff doesn't do well during disassembly. The threads and bore holes for the various pegs that hold the boards develop cracks an begin to crumble. When you start applying force during disassembly the weakened particle board gives way and the pins pull out of the flake board. Spent half a day repairing a nice looking flake board Ikea book case a friend gave me when he moved. Half of the pins ripped out and two shelves split during disassembly. Wood glue and epoxy putty to the rescue.
- 3y ago
dheera 3y ago
An unfortunate reality for the environment is that IKEA furniture often costs less to trash it and buy new than to hire people to move it. It would be interesting if we could create a world economy in which moving something always costed less than manufacturing another instance of it.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Moving furniture is probably a difficult one to charge for, but a disposal fee might incentivize moving or selling second-hand/reuse. If it's gonna cost me £30 to move a Billy and £50 to dispose of it, I'm going to move it instead. But mass manufacturing and the industrial revolution really and our current economic reality has warped things. It's easier for raw materials to be mined from the ground, processed in a factory, molded into a form, packaged, shipped across the ocean, put into a store, purchased by a vendor, and then resold to end consumer as part of a to-go meal in the form of a plastic fork, and then discarded by the consumer (me), than it is for me to bring a fork to the cafe and wash it and bring it home when I'm done.
  - dheera 3y ago
    IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle. The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture. The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.
alpinemeadow 3y ago
Your mind will be blown. We have a assemble/disassemble version of PAX wardrobes that takes 5 min to break down/put up.
rootusrootus 3y ago
My most recent lesson of IKEA is that quality has gone to shit. And prices are pretty high, all considered. Bought a couple new Hemnes dressers a few months back and they are just garbage compared to the older stuff. Material quality is same as usual, but the precision of manufacturing is gone. In the end, only one or two drawers actually open correctly. The rest bind up to varying degrees. I'm tempted to partially disassemble them and rebuild with my own hardware and glue in order to get tolerances that are adequate.
- ukuina 3y ago
  They have also replaced previously metal joints and screws with wooden pieces. I had to bolster my chest of drawers with additional wooden center beams to prevent it from bowing from evenly distributed weight. Oddly, there were already provisions for these additional beams, leading me to believe the design was "simplified" on the way to manufacturing.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    > Oddly, there were already provisions for these additional beams, leading me to believe the design was "simplified" on the way to manufacturing. More likely is that an earlier version of the product did have those supporting beams. Not on the way to manufacturing, during manufacturing. The typical IKEA experience is that the first 1-2 years of a product are built sturdier than later versions. They figure out ways to cut the cost of existing products. This hurts the consumer, because even if you hear "oh the Flybnort is very sturdy", that might no longer be true.
iso1631 3y ago
My oldest Ikea furniture dates from 2007, it's moved 5 times since I built it. Most stuff doesn't even need disassembly. My bed is Ikea and has been dissasembled and reassembled twice, no problems.
civilized 3y ago
> Another lesson of Ikea is that often you cannot move them from one home/apartment to another, because if you try to take it apart and then reassemble it, it's never the same. My IKEA desk has survived 13 moves since 2005...
- majjam 3y ago
  They dont build em like that any more (from wood).
  - filoleg 3y ago
    They do, you just gotta be a bit more creative, which will also save you money. Pro-tip for desks: don't buy them in the office section, buy desk legs from there, but the desk top itself from the kitchen section. Solid wood, no frills, cheaper pricing, and you can get some esoteric configs you cannot get from the office section. The choice of materials and shapes is much larger too. Hell, I imagine you can even get some marble-like top workdesk this way (though you might want to consider rethinking the desk legs and get something sturdier, marble is quite heavy). Around 2017, I wanted a long desk that could accomodate a workstation + area for printer/working on models/3D printing out of solid materials without breaking a bank. Going the approach I described above, I ended up spending under $200 total (and that's including tax) for a solid wood butcher's table quality workdesk that was long enough to accomodate 2 multi-monitor workstations very very comfortably (or 3 workstations, just a little bit less comfortably). Needed 6 desk legs for this one, but I eventually replaced the middle ones with a cheap Kallax storage piece (from IKEA as well).
    - BeefWellington 3y ago
      I did the same as you and about a year into the pandemic replaced the somewhat standard IKEA desk legs with a motorized standing desk leg kit. It's survived becoming new furniture even. :)
- jansan 3y ago
  If you just bought a massive oak board (the were nowhere cheaper and better that at IKEA around 2005) with two solid trestles, you should easily be able to move them 13 more times.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I disagree out of principle; I've been in half a dozen rewrite projects during my career (currently in one too); while I will concede that sometimes it's a good call, it's also a really expensive one. At least with a deep refactoring, if done right, the product continues to make money. In hindsight, I should've spent that 2.5 years at my previous job refactoring, optimizing and modernizing the existing PHP + Dojo codebase, instead of try to rewrite it in Go + React. Sure, the API was a factor 100 faster, the UI was faster and more responsive, the whole thing was future-proof for the next decade. But after 2.5 years I was only about 20-30% there in terms of feature parity. The existing codebase was one guy over the span of 7-8 years. I asked for reinforcements but never got them, only after two years did they carefully start putting up ads on e.g. monsterboard. You can see why I called it quits.
notatoad 3y ago
is there a way we can extend the metaphor here to cover this aspect of ikea furniture? it's perfectly serviceable and functional, but every time you mention the name people will go out of their way to tell you it isn't, you're wrong, and when you grow up you'll spend 10x as much for the "real" version that does basically the same thing.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Can we extend the anecdote to make it more accurate and say the opposite: that is, it's fragile but every time you mention it on HN, you'll have 10+ replies saying they personally moved it 13 times between apartments all across NYC, uphill, through snow, both ways, and then still sold it to someone else for a good price?
  - taberiand 3y ago
    Can we extend the anecdote and say that everyone has unique requirements, and a unique situation and experience, that may be broadly if inexactly grouped into a few general categories but we should all accept that there is no one single correct answer; instead there are a myriad of valid answers depending on context and we all have something to learn from each other?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Would love to, but that reeks of Big Design Up Front, and is too large to fit into a sprint anyway. It's not the 1980s, we don't think about what we do anymore. :).
  - melagonster 3y ago
    guess this is OOP or another programming paradigm.
anjel 3y ago
For quite a few thousand dollars, I bought a preconstructed lacquer bedroom set from a pricey national furniture chain. The saleman said the bedroom set came with a 10 yr warranty. 4 years later, I moved to a new residence, right after which the bed frame developed a nasty squeak (you know when) that definately hadn't been operative before I moved. I made a warranty claim to the national brand furniture company and was quickly educated as to the warranty fine-print terminating said warranty coverage at any address other than the one they delivered it to. Moving is rough on furniture in ways too costly to address by design, these days.
rqtwteye 3y ago
People like to complain about Ikea but is there any other furniture that's decent quality at a decent price available in the US? It seems unless you go super expensive everything else is basically crap that's still expensive. From what I have seen Ikea is by far the deal in the US. To add: I have moved Ikea furniture quite a few times without many problems. With most furniture I add some brackets on the backside to make it more sturdy which makes moving much easier.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

atoav 3y ago

I moved a ikea shelve through 3 flats and two nations. Ultimately I gifted it away because the new space wouldn't fit it and my requirements had changed, but I know people who are in the 5th flat. As long as you are treating the stuff right it should survive a few assembly-disassembly-cycles. Key is of couese to sort the screws, mark the parts with tape, etc.

belval 3y ago
Anecdotally I have had trouble reconciling this seemingly prevalent "you can't disassemble Ikea furniture" with my own experience. It's not made for it sure but bookshelves, bed frames and tables can all be reassembled reasonably well. Anything smaller you can just put in the truck when moving.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Again one of those impossible to kill memes, along with bad mounting instructions (they are on par with Lego, and way better than a lot of industry ones). Usually tells you more about the person making that point than about the point they try to make.
  - gxs 3y ago
    Anyone who’s ever finished putting together a piece of IKEA furniture only to realize they missed a few parts knows you can take it apart and put it back together perfectly fine.
  - watwut 3y ago
    IKEA instructions are the best instructions there exist, imo. You can consistently follow the steps. We had much worst experience with instructions feom other shops.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    > along with bad mounting instructions (they are on par with Lego, and way better than a lot of industry ones After reading Visual Thinking, I think this is a different brains problem. Some people just aren’t able to object visualize and need written step by step instructions. We tested this with my girlfriend using a LEGO set. In the time I blazed through 5 bags of Lego, she barely managed to get 1 assembled. Because she just struggles with visual instruction and manipulating objects in her mind. The opposite happens with sequential written instructions. I struggle to follow simple recipes without pictures and have to re-read the same step multiple times to get what they’re saying, whereas she can blaze through no problem and doesn’t understand why I’m struggling.
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    IMO Lego are the gold standard of instructions. From what a remember, IKEA also does labeled bags with a small subset of pieces. While I think IKEA instructions are clear enough, they feel frustrating at times, while Lego feels very satisfying. Maybe it is the full color of the Lego instructions, or that the consequences of a mistake are easier to undo? Or the lego units make it easier to count the distances. Or maybe my love of Lego is stronger than the often chore of assembling furniture, in a pavlovian way? :)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Well, to me, the furniture quality is meh, and they're quite fragile, but instructions are indeed good enough - and miles better than competition. One thing I specifically appreciate about IKEA instructions is the attention to detail in the drawings. With almost every IKEA purchase, at some point I hit a moment where some elements can be mated in several orientations, and there isn't an obvious way to tell which is the correct one. Sometimes it's apparent if you look couple steps ahead, but I found that you can always find a clue somewhere in the drawing of the unclear step. It's usually something like one of the elements having asymmetrically sized or arranged holes, which translates to a difference of 0.25mm to 1mm between some dots on the paper drawing. It's tiny, but it's always there, corresponding precisely to the piece I have in front of me. Of course, this could've been done better in many ways, but at least they care about precision of their drawings. Of companies in this space I had experience with, no one else does.
- mortenjorck 3y ago
  I think a big reason for this reputation is that IKEA is one of the few furniture brands big enough to have a wider-than-normal range of product tiers. Most brands have only one or two that are typically close together, while IKEA has at least three covering a much broader range of manufacturing methods and materials. And while you can get lucky with products in the lowest tier (I have some 15-year-old seating that fits this mold), often you do need to step up to at least the mid-tier to get something that will make it unscathed through moves.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  For bookshelves in particular (and wardrobes which have it too), I've found that trying to remove the nailed-in particleboard from the back usually goes really poorly. For furniture that doesn't have that, I agree with you.
  - ce4 3y ago
    The trick is to use screws from the start and throw away the nails. Also make notes on the back, to mark what part goes where and in what direction. And lastly, have a 90° gage to make sure all corners have right angles. This is very crucial. Sometimes floors are uneven and trick you into assembling the furniture askewed

Hikikomori 3y ago

Why take them apart? Just move them like regular furniture.

cuchoi 3y ago
Sometimes they just don't fit elevators / stairs :)
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  You just don't have a big enough hammer...
- iso1631 3y ago
  You just need to pivot
pixl97 3y ago
Depending on the piece they may not survive the structural stresses, especially the lower end models.
- iso1631 3y ago
  I've never had a piece of ikea equipment where that applies, I'm typing this on my ikea desk from 2011, next to a 2x2 kallax and another 2x4 kallax that have moved 5 and 3 times respectively.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Well, kallax 2x4 is still a rather light piece of furniture and there's not much need to disassemble it. This need grows with size/weight - e.g. couches, large wardrobes (Pax) etc.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      OTOH, I have a 4x4 Kallax that's barely been moved between the rooms couple times in the last few years, and it's already getting wobbly enough that I'm afraid to put much weight on it; it's another of my IKEA furniture pieces that'll end up reinforced with metal angle brackets.

voz_ 3y ago

A rewrite is almost never the right choice.

pphysch 3y ago
I much prefer a SWE culture that embraces iterative development, where "rewrites" and migrations are not feared and can be done safely and efficiently because care was taken during the design process to identify ontologies and system boundaries. Yes, the MVP takes a bit longer as a result. If you don't iterate, and you push what is essentially v0.1.0 to production, you reinforce a culture where deleting code is sin and the concept of iteration ("rewriting") is foreign. http://www.laputan.org/mud/ http://www.laputan.org/mud/
- makapuf 3y ago
  I think of it as: a whole rewrite is never the answer so don't start one, a gradual one always is, so plan for it.
kevincox 3y ago
If you have well defined components it is often reasonable to rewrite them. Rewriting an entire project is likely a mistake. I think the mistake is generally the size. If you lock up half of the team and have them rewrite for 2 years then you are likely going to have time. If you slice off components that can be rewritten by a few team members in a couple of weeks you can likely get a good quality result.
- voz_ 3y ago
  No lol, not on anything worth working on. Maybe on something small or with no real users.

HPsquared 3y ago

As long as you don't remove any of the "wood screw" elements (edit: that is, the screws used in the cam locks), they're perfectly ok to disassemble. They won't go as flat as the original box, but you can certainly transport them in pieces (with care).

watwut 3y ago

We moved our ikea furniture and it still works.

naet 3y ago

I have moved many times with Ikea furniture and purchased it used with no problems. Ikea furniture is some of the most disassemble and reassemble-able furniture I've seen.

ng12 3y ago
Yeah, I live in New York and the professional movers have made an artform of quickly disassembling and reassembling IKEA furniture.
waboremo 3y ago
Would relate to this. Even with normal wear and tear, reassembly isn't a problem. Perhaps the difference stems from how rushed/impatient one was during initial assembly. I do know a couple pieces where that happened and it resulted in wonky furniture because this knob was jammed in or that bit was misaligned for months. Would make sense considering a lot of people feel excited after purchasing it that they don't take their time with assembly. This is mostly for the older pieces, I know a lot of them now you have to really mess up for it to affect future reassembly.
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
Taking it down and re-assembling it honestly makes it last longer. If you start moving a structure made of a bunch of non-ridged squares, you're going to widen every hole and loosen every screw.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MisterTea 3y ago
The particle/flake board stuff doesn't do well during disassembly. The threads and bore holes for the various pegs that hold the boards develop cracks an begin to crumble. When you start applying force during disassembly the weakened particle board gives way and the pins pull out of the flake board. Spent half a day repairing a nice looking flake board Ikea book case a friend gave me when he moved. Half of the pins ripped out and two shelves split during disassembly. Wood glue and epoxy putty to the rescue.
3y ago

dheera 3y ago

An unfortunate reality for the environment is that IKEA furniture often costs less to trash it and buy new than to hire people to move it. It would be interesting if we could create a world economy in which moving something always costed less than manufacturing another instance of it.

fragmede 3y ago
Moving furniture is probably a difficult one to charge for, but a disposal fee might incentivize moving or selling second-hand/reuse. If it's gonna cost me £30 to move a Billy and £50 to dispose of it, I'm going to move it instead. But mass manufacturing and the industrial revolution really and our current economic reality has warped things. It's easier for raw materials to be mined from the ground, processed in a factory, molded into a form, packaged, shipped across the ocean, put into a store, purchased by a vendor, and then resold to end consumer as part of a to-go meal in the form of a plastic fork, and then discarded by the consumer (me), than it is for me to bring a fork to the cafe and wash it and bring it home when I'm done.
- dheera 3y ago
  IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle. The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture. The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.

alpinemeadow 3y ago

Your mind will be blown. We have a assemble/disassemble version of PAX wardrobes that takes 5 min to break down/put up.

rootusrootus 3y ago

My most recent lesson of IKEA is that quality has gone to shit. And prices are pretty high, all considered. Bought a couple new Hemnes dressers a few months back and they are just garbage compared to the older stuff. Material quality is same as usual, but the precision of manufacturing is gone. In the end, only one or two drawers actually open correctly. The rest bind up to varying degrees. I'm tempted to partially disassemble them and rebuild with my own hardware and glue in order to get tolerances that are adequate.

ukuina 3y ago
They have also replaced previously metal joints and screws with wooden pieces. I had to bolster my chest of drawers with additional wooden center beams to prevent it from bowing from evenly distributed weight. Oddly, there were already provisions for these additional beams, leading me to believe the design was "simplified" on the way to manufacturing.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  > Oddly, there were already provisions for these additional beams, leading me to believe the design was "simplified" on the way to manufacturing. More likely is that an earlier version of the product did have those supporting beams. Not on the way to manufacturing, during manufacturing. The typical IKEA experience is that the first 1-2 years of a product are built sturdier than later versions. They figure out ways to cut the cost of existing products. This hurts the consumer, because even if you hear "oh the Flybnort is very sturdy", that might no longer be true.

iso1631 3y ago

My oldest Ikea furniture dates from 2007, it's moved 5 times since I built it. Most stuff doesn't even need disassembly. My bed is Ikea and has been dissasembled and reassembled twice, no problems.

civilized 3y ago

> Another lesson of Ikea is that often you cannot move them from one home/apartment to another, because if you try to take it apart and then reassemble it, it's never the same. My IKEA desk has survived 13 moves since 2005...

majjam 3y ago
They dont build em like that any more (from wood).
- filoleg 3y ago
  They do, you just gotta be a bit more creative, which will also save you money. Pro-tip for desks: don't buy them in the office section, buy desk legs from there, but the desk top itself from the kitchen section. Solid wood, no frills, cheaper pricing, and you can get some esoteric configs you cannot get from the office section. The choice of materials and shapes is much larger too. Hell, I imagine you can even get some marble-like top workdesk this way (though you might want to consider rethinking the desk legs and get something sturdier, marble is quite heavy). Around 2017, I wanted a long desk that could accomodate a workstation + area for printer/working on models/3D printing out of solid materials without breaking a bank. Going the approach I described above, I ended up spending under $200 total (and that's including tax) for a solid wood butcher's table quality workdesk that was long enough to accomodate 2 multi-monitor workstations very very comfortably (or 3 workstations, just a little bit less comfortably). Needed 6 desk legs for this one, but I eventually replaced the middle ones with a cheap Kallax storage piece (from IKEA as well).
  - BeefWellington 3y ago
    I did the same as you and about a year into the pandemic replaced the somewhat standard IKEA desk legs with a motorized standing desk leg kit. It's survived becoming new furniture even. :)
jansan 3y ago
If you just bought a massive oak board (the were nowhere cheaper and better that at IKEA around 2005) with two solid trestles, you should easily be able to move them 13 more times.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

I disagree out of principle; I've been in half a dozen rewrite projects during my career (currently in one too); while I will concede that sometimes it's a good call, it's also a really expensive one. At least with a deep refactoring, if done right, the product continues to make money. In hindsight, I should've spent that 2.5 years at my previous job refactoring, optimizing and modernizing the existing PHP + Dojo codebase, instead of try to rewrite it in Go + React. Sure, the API was a factor 100 faster, the UI was faster and more responsive, the whole thing was future-proof for the next decade. But after 2.5 years I was only about 20-30% there in terms of feature parity. The existing codebase was one guy over the span of 7-8 years. I asked for reinforcements but never got them, only after two years did they carefully start putting up ads on e.g. monsterboard. You can see why I called it quits.

notatoad 3y ago

is there a way we can extend the metaphor here to cover this aspect of ikea furniture? it's perfectly serviceable and functional, but every time you mention the name people will go out of their way to tell you it isn't, you're wrong, and when you grow up you'll spend 10x as much for the "real" version that does basically the same thing.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Can we extend the anecdote to make it more accurate and say the opposite: that is, it's fragile but every time you mention it on HN, you'll have 10+ replies saying they personally moved it 13 times between apartments all across NYC, uphill, through snow, both ways, and then still sold it to someone else for a good price?
- taberiand 3y ago
  Can we extend the anecdote and say that everyone has unique requirements, and a unique situation and experience, that may be broadly if inexactly grouped into a few general categories but we should all accept that there is no one single correct answer; instead there are a myriad of valid answers depending on context and we all have something to learn from each other?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Would love to, but that reeks of Big Design Up Front, and is too large to fit into a sprint anyway. It's not the 1980s, we don't think about what we do anymore. :).
- melagonster 3y ago
  guess this is OOP or another programming paradigm.

anjel 3y ago

For quite a few thousand dollars, I bought a preconstructed lacquer bedroom set from a pricey national furniture chain. The saleman said the bedroom set came with a 10 yr warranty. 4 years later, I moved to a new residence, right after which the bed frame developed a nasty squeak (you know when) that definately hadn't been operative before I moved. I made a warranty claim to the national brand furniture company and was quickly educated as to the warranty fine-print terminating said warranty coverage at any address other than the one they delivered it to. Moving is rough on furniture in ways too costly to address by design, these days.

rqtwteye 3y ago

People like to complain about Ikea but is there any other furniture that's decent quality at a decent price available in the US? It seems unless you go super expensive everything else is basically crap that's still expensive. From what I have seen Ikea is by far the deal in the US. To add: I have moved Ikea furniture quite a few times without many problems. With most furniture I add some brackets on the backside to make it more sturdy which makes moving much easier.

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