All IKEA furniture I’ve bought has lasted a long time, but the meme is wrong, the reason it even exists is you can’t buy better quality furniture for the same price, at least not by very much, it will cost a lot more if you want amazing quality.
For the same price
Lol
OP has clearly never purchased furniture
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 60•10 months ago
No idea what that guy’s talking about. I bought a bunch of furniture from Ikea 15 years ago and all of it is still standing. Even the flimsy-looking chairs.
Yea, there are a couple tiers of ikea quality, and it’s clearly reflected in the price.
I spent $600 on a king size tufted headboard and box spring set and it’s been a tank for 10 years. I bought a $400 tv console and it’s similarly been a tank for 12 years.
I bought a cheap table for my dorm room and it didn’t survive the year.
I bought a £30 coffee table from IKEA and it lasted me 6 years and 6 house moves. Only reason I got rid of it is because the flat I moved into had the exact same one already
You expect to coherent points from 4chan? Everyone’s an idiot on that platform. Case and point they are arguing for a completely disprovable point.
Where do you get wooden furniture for the same price?
cheaper, not the same price … and it’s in the thrift stores. I love buying old shit and refurbishing to my liking, it’s fin, it’s good for the enviroment, your wallet and it’s unique. Not gonna find my coffee table in any floorroom and that bitch would break a mofos back
Well, I’m in a third would country and wood furniture is cheaper than ikea for sure. Even custom made stuff is not that expensive sometimes.
OP has clearly never priced out solid wood furniture. A single mission-style sofa–by which I mean something made using Gustav Stickley’s plans–will typically retail for well over $3000 US. …Such as this version–from the original Stickley company–that has an MSRP of >$9000
OPs whole shit is wrong, honestly. I have a house furnished on quite a lot of Ikea shit that’s been going strong for 10ish years through multiple moves? Though I don’t disagree that I’d rather have better materials like real wood that can be refinished and really can last a century, that is not happening for anywhere near Ikea prices.
Exactly what I’m thinking, can furnish a whole place for a price of some of these solid wood furniture.
Speak for yourself, I have multiple IKEA furniture that’s lasted me for 10 years. You just have to be careful and take care of your stuff.
The massive wood furniture that lasts two lifetimes is only as cheap as the IKEA counterpart if you do it all by yourself, in your own little woodshop, and only need to pay for glue, nails, hinges, and electricity. And still only of you Include felling and milling the trees on your own.
Some years ago, I wanted one wall of the living room done with a custom-made, wall filling book shelf. Estimated cost by the carpenter: 7000. I paid about 3000 for IKEA furniture and other materials and did two walls of shelves instead of just one, suspended the ceiling, ran a ton of wires and redid the whole living room electrical and communication infrastructure. Yes, all that for half the price quoted by the carpenter. Guess what? None of the furniture has broken down so far. And I don’t expect it to.
In the UK before Ikea, it was MFI (colloquially known as ‘Made For Idiots’) that was even lower quality chipboard horrible furniture.
Yes, Ikea isnt some handcrafted solid wood furniture but until most people can afford that stuff, it will do.
Yeah what’s with this idea that solid wood furniture costs the same as IKEA’s equivalent. That’s just not true. If it was no one would buy IKEA furniture so it’s obviously not true.
Mr green text is a lying git.
I bought one piece of real furniture and the only reason we could afford it was because it was made by a dude as his hobby and he was selling practically for cost. And even then I had to really commit that I wanted that walnut dresser. Internals are still MDF btw.
Yeah the prices here are all out of wack. I’d love to buy nice, long lasting furniture. Please tell me where I can get a couch that will last generations for $500? I have some hand me down furniture that’s good quality and even in it’s day it was.a significant investment. My dining room table cost ~$1200 when it was brand new. If I didn’t have that I’d be using some $150 pressboard garbage from target or Ikea because that’s all I can reasonably afford
I actually like putting the flat packs together. It’s like Lego for adults.
Sue me.
Flat pack stuff has been around much longer then IKEA. The real wood stuff was great, but heavy and inconvenient to transport. That’s why the flat pack stuff caught on so fast.
Particle board is heavier than un-processed wood. Ikea does sell some stuff made from actual wood if you look for it. I bought an unfinished pine table from them for $60 a few years ago.
That’s just false. Particle board is without a doubt less dense than actual wood.
I can spend a good deal of time criticizing Ikea but on one thing I can’t: their furniture is incredibly easy to copy and upgrade into a better version with minimal effort.
I took the time to break down, piece by piece, in a crazy exercise of reverse engineering, a love seat, to understand how they had designed and put together the thing.
After that, I sat to run the “numbers” and realised I could make it cheaper, sturdier and add storage room to it, with minimal modifications to the basic plan.
It was very interesting to discover.
I mean sure but then it sounds like you’re already a woodworker with the proper tools. Most people aren’t that.
I’m not. Far from that.
In fact, I live in a country where being a carpenter is not even a hobby and traditional, small scale carpentry shops are very uncommon.
We had a very strong push to shift the country towards services and white collar professions during the 80s and 90s.
For myself, whatever little “carpentry” I know comes from personal curiosity. What I do is use the services of a carpenter to do what I can’t, which is usually the cutting and rough fitting of parts, and I do the finishing, like sanding, stain, varnish, etc, which is also the most expensive and labor intense but requires less tools.
You don’t have to pay for R&D, warehousing, shipping, marketing, etc.
The only thing you don’t get is bulk rates on the parts. But the parts themselves are cheap.
Correct
Ikea is good at standardized parts and dimensions, you can often swap pieces around and do more stuff with modularity. Also they’re pretty easy to fix when broken. A reinforcing bracket here, an extra screw there, attach it to the studs, there are options.
You’ll notice most responses in this thread are saying “5+ years ago, 10+ years ago, 15+ years ago” but if you check out IKEA prices and quality post-Romanian wood poaching bust, and post-Ukraine/Russia war, it’s like night and day.
A couch in 2021 was $799 USD for a 3 piece sectional, now it’s $1599 USD, and their entire “Solid Wood” search category has been replaced by “Wood + Particle Board + Veneer / Wood-like finish”, as their solid wood category was removed. Now you have to discern every piece by eye and material quality.
Most of the furniture in my home is from IKEA, but imo it’s gone dramatically downhill and will probably continue to do so.
Enshittification doesn’t just apply to online things.
Not Ikea specific, but proper wood furniture only really makes sense if you’re staying somewhere long term, have your own house, etc. If you have to move every couple of years for work, because rent is getting too expensive, etc etc, solid wood furniture is really inconvenient and expensive to transport.
As someone that worked in a cabinet shop for years, all mass produced furniture is going to be basically the same quality as what you buy from IKEA. It just feels cheap when you do it yourself.