Because that 2 lifetimes table doesnt cost $800 thats what grandma paid for it in the 50s when buying a 4 bedroom house for $30,000 and working at the mill for 50 years was normal.
It also weighs 3 tons and given that you live in a shitty 1 bedroom apartment and have to move every 6 months to an even smaller shoebox that costs an increasing % of your income every damn time, Its probably for the best that your shit is disposable.
I built a shoe rack during the pandemic. It actually turned out great, it's way better than something from IKEA. It was indeed 2-3x the cost of an equivalent thing from IKEA if you consider all the tools and stuff I had to buy though.
Yep Anon never went furnishing shopping. $800 will get you a large wardrobe at IKEA. Anything equivalent will be far more than double the cost if you want it made from real wood and new.
I moved out of our house and if I wanted some furniture and beds for the kids do I spend $450 total for all 3 of us to have a bed or do I spend $2k when I'm trying to get shit settled down?
And yes, to your point, I've moved twice since then and that would have been a nightmare. And 5 years later the bed still is fine
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.
Agreed, yet to find any ikea (or any non-ikea being fair) fail to hold whatever items i put into them... Sounds like you (OP, not person i am replying to), might ve storing something strange in them to fail often enough to complain about ALL ikea furniture...
Flat pack furniture traditionally had the relationship for being crap, in particular for missing pieces like a screw here or there, but when Ikea came along they did things properly. That was the reason they got so popular, they were so much better than the competition, and they forced others to up their game. I think they were the first to actually include extra screws, to cover the occassions when they weren't there, but these days their quality assurance is so good they just include the exact right amount every time.
Also, you can bring home a full armoire in a hatchback. Real wood furniture is large and heavy, and requires specialized equipment to get it up to an apartment.
Having antique furniture is like owning an upright piano. It probably has sentimental value, and will outlive humanity with minimal maintenance, but not everyone has the space for it, and when it comes time to relocate it, you realize why furniture went flatpack.
Real talk, I fit an Ikea mattress, slats, bedframe, and a weeks' worth of groceries in my Ford Focus hatch when I was moving into an apartment in college. Meanwhile I had to rent a U-Haul for the 60 year old dresser passed down from my parents, because it wouldn't fit in my car or either of their SUVs.
I make and restore wood furniture. I have taken plenty of “all wood” furniture apart, repaired it, or just salvaged whatever actual wood scraps I could find.
Whatever idiot wrote this has no idea how expensive true wood furniture is. There is hardly ANY actual wood furniture in the market, PERIOD. You think it’s wood, but it’s veneered ply or fiberboard. That is the state of the entire industry, not just IKEA. This is a simple fact of life in a world that has already been heavily deforested even before all 8 BILLION PEOPLE currently living were born. Wood is precious. You also don’t need solid wood for your fucking nightstand. So maybe you should buy a nightstand made out of the particleboard that is waste product from milling lumber for other uses, like construction. That’s called using everything, wasting nothing. It’s sustainable.
There is nothing wrong with IKEA furniture for most people’s everyday needs. And you are not going to get a 150-year all wood piece for the same price. LOL fuck no. When you are in your 40s and have made it big time you can go to a craft furniture maker and get a solid oak bedroom set. It will cost more than your first car did.
IKEA furniture does not fall apart in 3 years, either. I’m about to go get my pajamas out of the IKEA dresser I’ve had since 2001. It won’t last centuries like a real craftsman made wood dresser. But it’s not 3 year garbage either, and looks and works like the day I bought it, despite me using it daily for 22 years and moving it between at least 4 houses in that time.
IKEA furniture is good for what it is and very cheap. One of the reasons it’s cheap is that it is flat packed for efficient shipping. Assembly by the customer also saves cost. And seriously, if you can’t figure out the IKEA instructions, you must not be trying very hard.
And seriously, if you can’t figure out the IKEA instructions, you must not be trying very hard.
You missed the part where the same idiot posting stupid misunderstandings about the furniture market is the one trying to assemble the furniture. They're working their ass off trying to assemble that nightstand, but it's too damn complicated. Just opening the box took years off their life.
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.
Sometimes on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, or similar. If you like mid-century modern, and are willing to reupholster, you can often find 50 year old pieces at estate sales and such. But new? Ain't happening.
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
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.
They don’t use text in the instructions, just pictures. This lets them print the same instructions book for all the hundred countries they sell in. But it can make assembly just a little bit more tricky. This is the only even moderately challenging part, but like you say it’s usually fun.
Have you tried putting furniture with written instructions together? IKEA is a million times easier because they show you right in the pictures what you gotta do, instead of trying to explain it in words.
In my experience, it's a choice between decent Ikea shelves that don't sag after a few years of use and super shitty Walmart furniture that falls apart in about 6 months.
Aside from the price of good quality wooden furniture, it's heavy as hell which is rough when you're a renter and moving every few years. There's also a lot of wooden furniture, old or new, is just as poorly constructed with peeling veneer and failing staples. Not everyone has the time, money, or space to fix that up.
And all that being said, Ikea isn't really that expensive for what it is. Their soft furnishings and decorative items seem overpriced, but their storage products (mostly what I get from them) are pretty decently priced. Yeah I've had my issues with missing parts and shitty customer service, but all in all my experience has been positive enough to keep going back.
I still want to get a couple really nice, high quality items, but I'm not going to break the bank every time I need a bookshelf.
Not to mention, they do sell actual nice solid furniture for decent prices. For example, my current dining table from Ikea is solid wood, not veneered particle board, and was less than $200 dollars. I'll gladly take the 5 minutes it took to screw the legs on for a decent piece of furniture at that price.
I also have a few of those adjustable metal shelves from Ikea, which have been sitting on my balcony for two years now, exposed to the elements, with not a single spot of rust on them. Those were about half the price of comparable shelves from a big box store, which rusted out in less than a year.
Sure Ikea sells some cheap crap that disintegrates if you look at it wrong, and that sucks, but if you're just a little more selective about what you buy there, you can get stuff that'll last at a very reasonable price.
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.
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.
... What? I have Ikea furniture that's lasted 10+ years, through 5+ moves including disassembly and reassembly every time. Nothing took more than 20 minutes to assemble, and I definitely believe this furniture can outlive me.
Yeah it's not bad for the price. There are always exceptions, and particle board struggles with humidity, but for most use cases most of the time, Ikea nails price/performance.
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.
I’ve got an Ikea couch I bought fifteen years ago that’s made a move across the US three times. I have two kids in their teens. The couch is still in good shape. I also have an entertainment center/TV stand that I bought from them 10 years ago from Ikea that’s in great shape.
That's cheap! I paid $800 for a sectional sofa from a scratch and dent markdown furniture store. It was among the cheapest furniture they had. And it had slight cosmetic damage.
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.
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.
It, like most things, wasn’t expensive. You used to have to pay a shit ton for anything that wasn’t custom made. Then Ikea came along and created massive competition and variety for the furniture market. Yes, now other brands are better, but that’s because they had to compete with Ikea
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is any of the stuff like shelving or say a load bearing surface like a desk. Those flat surfaces are almost always MDF or whatever cheap engineered wood products IKEA uses. The furniture looks nice initially, especially for the price, but the horizontal surfaces always sag after 2-3 years even under low weight. I have a dresser, a desk, and shelving that all developed this problem and some of the shelves barely have anything on them.
Same here, most of my flat is ikea stuff and they've been going strong for 10 years. I don't buy the cheapest options at ikea but still, a kallax will easily last you that much if you don't jump on it. Only thing I don't recommend is mattress.
I've had my Billy bookshelf for 20 years, always stocked full with books and never did any of the shelves sag. Same for my ikea desk that's used every day.
I bought an IKEA desk that caved in when I attached my monitor mount to it. That said, the legs were good enough and made of metal so I just bought a piece of timber to be the desk top and attached the IKEA legs
Almost all furniture in my room is Ikea (except the table which is custom) and the 3 year claim is definitely wrong.
We even own our Ikea kitchen for over 12 years now and it still isn't broken at all. The only thing that broke in that time is the oven at the beginning of this year.
Ikea is not the same grade as custom made real wood furniture, that is true. But it is exponentially cheaper and easier to transport. And on top of that, speaking specifically about Ikea vs other similar options, it is roughly the same cost but in my experience higher quality.
If you go buy flat pack consumer-assembled furniture from a big box store like target or Walmart, in my experience you've got at least a 40-50% chance that you are missing a piece, it's damaged, the instructions are shit, etc. Since we started buying stuff at IKEA I have done quite a few builds. Never once have I even had a missing piece. But on top of that the quality control on the machining and fit of parts is head and shoulders better than equivalent options from other big box stores. I never have to force things, they fit as designed, etc.
I'm not here to say Ikea is super high quality furniture compared to real, heirloom quality furniture. But it's laughable to claim that it doesn't occupy a very useful and necessary niche between real furniture and Walmart crap.
It isn't. I have a bunch of ikea furniture because I'm not really settled in where I live, so it's nice and easy and lightweight to take apart and move every 3 years. For one, it absolutely isn't that expensive, and it's pretty good quality. My oldest pieces are two kallax units that were already second hand when I bought them 6 years ago, and they're still in the exact same condition as when I bought them, even through 3 moves. The only thing I'm disappointed about are a couple of wooden folding chairs because the horizontal slats tend to get loose and fall out, but you can just pop them back in in 5 seconds. It's obviously not as good as high quality non-ikea furniture, but if you (have to) move often and don't have much money, it's just a good and practical choice.
Bought my Ikea kitchen when moving into this house 17 years ago. Got a new one this year because of water damage due to a leaking pipe. Most of the stuff was still in good condition though.