People hate on Apple here for being unrepairable... but really Ikea is the best example of the worst kind of building-to-be-disposable.
Furniture like a simple table should last you a lifetime, and last your children a lifetime beyond that. You should be able to repair and fix damage. Most furniture can't even become obsolete for technical reasons.
Instead Ikea use veneers and crumbling particle materials so you can't fix it at all. Many people say you essentially can't move Ikea furniture between houses because you can't dismantle it and if you tried to it'd simply fall apart.
Ikea was a terrible thing to happen to furniture - disposable single-use furniture - madness.
I can't say this is never a problem-can't prove a negative-but my house is full of IKEA furniture, half of it bought used, most of it made of particle board like you say (although they do have nicer real wood products), all of which having survived several decades of use.
A leg came off my desk once. I drilled new holes and was able to screw the leg back in. Similarly a slide on a dresser drawer somehow got bent out of shape and I was able to get a single replacement part sent to me from IKEA. The only real problem I have with IKEA furniture is that most of it can't survive disassembly and reassembly well enough for me to flat-pack it when moving; I have to move it fully assembled.
I am amazed that such cheap (in both price and quality) furniture can last that long. Granted, I haven't ever tried to karate chop my desk in half, but I have come to the conclusion that even the worst furniture is fine. But I probably won't give my $20 desk to my eventual grandkids.
"Furniture like a simple table should last you a lifetime, and last your children a lifetime beyond that. "
Have you thought about the consequences if everyone bought furniture like that? There's a reason why solid wood furniture is more expensive, it's a LOT more resource intensive and wasteful during manufacturing. Imagine if everyone started buying all solid wood furniture tomorrow? How many more trees would be cut down? How much wood fiber left over from making other products would be wasted because people wouldn't want it for furniture anymore?
"Ikea was a terrible thing to happen to furniture - disposable single-use furniture - madness."
I haven't seen a single person back this up with any facts, i.e. - what's the resource use per year of an average IKEA furniture and the alternative?
I'm willing to bet you and others are just making a giant assumption, based on your own personal annoyance that the furniture isn't as solid as you'd like.
I'm not going to make a strong counter-claim. Yes, IKEAs way could be worse, but I've yet to see proof of that, and you can make a pretty strong argument that IKEAs way has a potential to be more sustainable. Especially if they manage to recycle the wood fibers efficiently.
"Many people say you essentially can't move Ikea furniture between houses because you can't dismantle it and if you tried to it'd simply fall apart." - In my experience that's simply wrong. I just disassembled/reassembled a relatively new IKEA wardrobe during renovation. I did not handle it gently. It was no problem. Yeah, you can get some damage, but nothing a bit of glue, an extra screw and/or plaster+paint can't fix easily. You can get catastrophic damage if you're not careful, but I'm willing to bet that the probability of that is low enough that the global impact on average lifetime is low.
> Have you thought about the consequences if everyone bought furniture like that? There's a reason why solid wood furniture is more expensive, it's a LOT more resource intensive and wasteful during manufacturing. Imagine if everyone started buying all solid wood furniture tomorrow?
The priority is reduce, reuse, recycle.
Buying lifetime furniture is working to 'reduce'.
Ikea is (only now) introducing 'recycle', the worst option of the three.
> Have you thought about the consequences if everyone bought furniture like that? There's a reason why solid wood furniture is more expensive, it's a LOT more resource intensive and wasteful during manufacturing. Imagine if everyone started buying all solid wood furniture tomorrow? How many more trees would be cut down? How much wood fiber left over from making other products would be wasted because people wouldn't want it for furniture anymore?
What if I turn that argument around? What if people started buying solid wood furniture? It would result in an increased amount of wood being used in items where the carbon will remain in place for a very long time. The trees would be replaced with newly planted ones that sequester even more carbon, and so we end up with less carbon in the atmosphere.
Now, this obviously assumes that we can make the solid wood furniture with a small enough carbon footprint for this to work, but the general idea isn't bad.
You can definitely move couches, beds, and tables from IKEA between houses, I've done it a ton of times. Yes, you generally can't fix it, but that's because you bought the cheap particle stuff instead of their higher end thing.
There are some things that will fall apart (wardrobes, kitchens etc), having participated in a few moves: I assure you that non-ikea stuff from the '70s will also have issues: panels will have bent, cheap parts will crumble, adjustments that were made to fit it to the original position won't work anymore etc.
That is, even if you wanted, because the style of a 30 year old wardrobe is likely to not fit anything you will buy in this decade and you'll still not want it around.
The idea of furniture that lasts a lifetime is dead because of the pace of modern fashion changes, not because you can't reuse things, the same way it is for shoes and clothes.
Some of my IKEA bookshelves withstood at least two moves, retaining a reasonable shape. Though yes, particle board is not the sturdiest of materials, and is harder to amend than wood.
My IKEA dinner table is solid wood, though, perfectly repairable if need be; same with chairs.
Ideed, a lot of this hate is undeserved: you can buy solid wood products at Ikea, they obviously won't be the cheapest option avaliable.
They are actually really good at detailing all materials used for their product - you know whether you are buying a shelf made of chrome plated steel, galvanised steel, epoxy coated steel, or galvanised and then epoxy coated.
Look at Argos on the other hand - you have no clue of it's paper honycomb, particleboard or wood. You get a cat in a bag.
Same here. When I was in college I bought the shitiest, cheapest IKEA shelves (LACK?) basically made from cartboard that's mounted on a steel rack. They survived three moves, no damage whatsoever.
I'm sure that this does not apply to every piece they make, but I wouldn't shit on every thing they make.
Another thing I like about IKEA is that I can get parts for most of the things that tend to break. My friend had a custom made kitchen. One of the cabinet hindges broke but the contractor was nowhere to be found to replace it, and he had to scour the internets for that specific replacement. If one of the hindges in my IKEA kitchen breaks I'm sure I'll be able to replace it, probably at no cost, because it's still being made and probably will still be made in 10 years.
If one of the hindges in my IKEA kitchen breaks I'm sure I'll be able to replace it, probably at no cost, because it's still being made and probably will still be made in 10 years.
Don't be too sure of that. IKEA has greatly sped up their 'upgrade' cycle lately. Somethings are around unchanged year after year, but more and more things aren't. I've had several cases where I came back to IKEA 2 years later and wanted to expand or replace a thing in a furniture series only to find it discontinued.
> Furniture like a simple table should last you a lifetime
Furniture might last. Living arrangements don't, especially in the early part of life as an independent adult. The fate of quite a lot of cheap furniture is to be dumped in the street, unfortunately - but that's also mostly mattresses and couches, which aren't part of the IKEA re-use scheme.
There's an existing charity shop economy of used furniture, much of which is house clearances of the dead; it's pretty cheap, because the cost of moving it around dominates.
Particle board and assemble-yourself were around way before IKEA made it to my town. I don't remember visiting IKEA until the early 2000s in the US. IKEA was nice because things were flat-packed, with simpler assembly instructions, and modular enough that you could repair or add on. I also noticed the furniture was significantly lighter--not so much that it was functionally flimsy, but way easier to move place to place.
I've bought non-IKEA furniture since and it's just like I remember it. Even pre-assembled stuff is all veneer, so when your kid bangs it up you can't really touch it up or buff it out.
I'd love to get all solid wood stuff. (IKEA does have some solid-wood stuff. I have a bookshelf I've moved 4 or 5 times and have had for probably 10 years) I hear some parts of the world still readily sell solid wood furniture at reasonable prices--just not around me. One issue with solid wood furniture is the size and weight. Fitting it through a door, into a car, or up 3 flights of stairs doesn't make sense for a college dorm or a studio apartment.
Particle board isn't always unfixable. To be fair, if a wooden shelf on some furniture splits, most folks aren't going to be able to fix it well either. You can still use putty to fix wood screw holes sometimes, though.
It isn't like older furniture was always able to be dismantled. It depended on what it was. Bedframe? Sure. Take the legs off of the dining table. And I'm pretty sure you can do this to most Ikea furniture.
On the other hand, you'd take the drawers out of a dress or desk. The shelves out of a bookcase. And simply move what was left. That tall, heavy display cabinet went in one piece. That huge desk was still heavy without the drawers, and taking it apart would absolutely ruin it.
I'll also point out that fewer people would have furniture if it weren't for Ikea and other flat pack furniture.
>Instead Ikea use veneers and crumbling particle materials so you can't fix it at all. Many people say you essentially can't move Ikea furniture between houses because you can't dismantle it and if you tried to it'd simply fall apart.
Not only say that. It has happened to me. I bought 3 doors wardrobe with 2 mirror doors. 2 years later I was moving to a different accommodation, wardrobe fall apart when we were holding it above stairs. Only mirror doors were reusable. The rest filled full container for garbage.
I'm all for buy-for-life, so I bought only oak-made furniture since then. I still visit IKEA quite often, but just for plants and clearance section where you can find sheepskin, natural carpets and IoT lights for 1/3 of price. They also have really good hot chocolate and cakes :D
The only issue I've had with pax is the need to replace the backboard each time I've moved it (twice). Next time I'm rigging up my own thing to make it removable.
As posted elsewhere in this thread, my counter-anecdote: I had a pax wardrobe (also with two mirror doors!) which lasted seven years and two house moves (i.e. three houses) very well, before being sold on to a new home a few months ago, in pretty decent condition.
I don't understand how you handle your furniture. Even the cheap ones can be reassembled carefully, but you need to handle it gently and slowly. There is a second hand market for all of it.
The disparate experiences across people lead me to think that some people are unknowingly handling it roughly and quickly without much thought.
Also, if you can afford to get better ones, get them. Although Ikea is already not the cheapest, we used to be lower middle class in Hungary and couldn't afford Ikea stuff and bought similar particle board stuff from no name places that was way harder to assemble and was less structurally strong. For all the hate it gets, Ikea is well designed for average Western European and North American students and young adults. Once you earn like an average American middle class family, you can afford better furniture, so if it's important to you, do it. But many people know what they are getting and are satisfied with the tradeoffs.
I don't think it's a question of how it's handled - it's simple material science facts that particle board has low strength, cannot be repaired, and doesn't resist things like getting water spilt on it.
Almost all my furniture has been particle boards (more stuff is particle boards than amateurs would think) since my childhood and it's been okay. Yeah, if you soak it in water it swells. It can be repaired very well, you can drill new holes, you can attach metal pieces to strengthen it etc. If you take it apart carefully, it can be reassembled. Done it many times. If you rip it apart quickly, and force things, you may damage it.
For example I don't care about any furniture my parents had, it was ugly and it sucked. Not going into "fine china" or whatever crap my mother used to hoard.
When I move between flats, I might reuse some furniture but a lot of it I would have to sell. I would lose loads of money if I would buy expensive furniture and then sell it for 70% of what I paid for, I don't even think I could get that much for used furniture, probably 50% would be more realistic.
Cheap IKEA I can basically give away and not have to haggle for price with cheapskates over the phone (mental health toll for me is too high if I have to sell something). If it is broken I can dump it and since it is cardboard it probably will not be that bad for environment.
If someone is having steady life conditions for next 20 years then he can afford "life time" items. With current situation I would not count on that and I'd rather have stuff that I can easily dispose/give away in case I have to move to smaller apartment because I cannot afford current one anymore.
Owning things also has its costs, like if I am renting flat and have shitty neighbors I can just move to other place. When I would own a flat I am stuck with whatever comes my way.
> Instead Ikea use veneers and crumbling particle materials so you can't fix it at all.
As always, you get what you pay for.
A LACK coffee table costs $30, because it's made of particleboard.
But if you buy a HEMNES coffee table or a LIATORP for example, you will get a piece of solid wood furniture that will last generations, but it's gonna cost you $300 instead.
It's not exactly surprising that people are buying the "good enough" stuff that's 10x cheaper, because if that option didn't exist, people would simply buy a lot less furniture overall, because quality furniture is expensive, even at IKEA.
Kids move out and get their own places and their own furniture long before their parents kick the bucket. My wife's grandmother had a house of solid wood furniture. It all went into an estate sale and I'm guessing most of it ended up in the landfill. Her kids already had their own houses full of their own furniture and lived across the country.
Why would you like to use the same table for decades?
In 10 years time you will see a nicer, more modern table that you could buy.
It is similar to phones, you could use old dumbphone for 10 years (I still have mine somewhere and use it when I send my smartwatch for repairs), but majority of people don't want to.
This obsession with newer, nicer and pristine - it has to be clean, scratchless, beautiful - is what's killing the habitability of our planet right now. And it's in a large part driven by marketing.
The argument makes some sense for phones, which are fast-evolving hardware. Typical house furniture is a mature design.
The irony in it all is that there are businesses specializing in new furniture that looks old and worn because people like the look. But nobody seems to be interested re-using an existing piece of furniture.
It should, but it'll cost more, because proper wood and construction costs money (surprise!).
I bought a secondhand oak coffee table, heavy and chunky, and I have no clue how old it is; could be 20, could be 70, we may never know. But buying something like that new would cost hundreds, probably.
- MDF/Particulate is more efficient at using the whole tree and more friendly to native forests as opposed to traditional furniture
- Less weight than traditional furniture
- Moving costs > purchase costs.
You want traditional solid furniture? Go to a flea market, used furniture store. It can probably be gotten for cheap as it is a nuisance. It weights a ton, it is hard to move, it is less ergonomic (though I have some beef with some current Ikea stuff) etc
Yes it will last forever, but it does require maintenance (which most of the time can't be done in-situ, so take that heavy thing downstairs, to a shop, etc, back, etc). Not practical
From homefinding TV shows I am aware of some places where selling houses or apartments furnished seems to be a thing. At the other end of things, there are cultures where people take their kitchen cabinets with them. .. I tend to think of more energy-constrained futures, and generational downsizing in terms of housing, so I wonder if the former could spread. Convenience in moving > signalling perfect taste?
This is sort of true. I moved a wardrobe 3 times and by the third time is was kind of falling apart. But also it's pretty irrelevant because if it hadn't been IKEA furniture I wouldn't have been able to move it at all. Most furniture does not disassemble nearly as well as IKEA furniture.
But it sure would be nice if they used fewer one-or-two-time fixings like particle board screws.
You can buy packs of the screws etc. separately, though, and for a lot of the products you can also buy e.g. shelving, drawers and doors separately if anything breaks. At least I've always been able to do that in the IKEA's near me.
I don't see how extra screws would help - it's the wood that fails. And can you really buy spare parts? For example if you just need the side pieces for a bed can you buy those? I somehow doubt it. The "Spare Parts" page on their website is just an email form.
Furniture like a simple table should last you a lifetime, and last your children a lifetime beyond that. You should be able to repair and fix damage. Most furniture can't even become obsolete for technical reasons.
Instead Ikea use veneers and crumbling particle materials so you can't fix it at all. Many people say you essentially can't move Ikea furniture between houses because you can't dismantle it and if you tried to it'd simply fall apart.
Ikea was a terrible thing to happen to furniture - disposable single-use furniture - madness.