…psshhhhh - as if i’ll ever be able to afford kids to someday give me grandkids…
…i’ll die destitute and alone in a gutter somewhere and i’ve made my peace with that…
The only thing my kids will inherit from me is ADHD.
C U B E
Easier to clean I guess
I’ve actually never found a name of an IKEA product to be fake. They can be obscure, odd, and some would normally be split. But never truly fake. Though, FEJKA does mean “to fake”. Which is an honest name for a series of fake plants.
Yeah, don’t know what that “fake” is all about. It’s a Swedish company that gives Swedish names to their product lines and actually seems to care about maintaining their reputation for good design instead of enshitification so they can gouge their loyal customers until they realize they shouldn’t be loyal anymore.
Though I do wonder why I don’t mind IKEA’s Swedish product names but find Starbucks’ use of Italian words for cup sizes to be insufferable…
Starbucks sizes aren’t really descriptive. Tall is the small size and the only one named in English, grande means large in Italian but is actually the medium-sized cup, and venti means twenty in Italian which is meant to be twenty ounces but the name doesn’t tell you how big it is compared to the other sizes. It’s dumb.
Lol that gives it a similar energy to people who get Japanese tattoos without knowing what the kanji even mean, only to later find out that what they thought said “powerful warrior” actually means “one udon meal set, please”.
Because everyone else uses “small, medium, large” and it’s annoying to have to switch when that’s something you commonly use. Whereas furniture lines often have made up or creative names because companies need some names to differentiate the 20 different dining room tables they sell. Other retailers might use “the classic collection” and “the modern collection” or whatever. But it’s not standardized like small, medium, and large.
I’ve never been to a Starbucks. But from the content I see about them online, they do seem like a typical American fakery outlet.
Venti, that’s twenty in Italian, is a cup of twenty American stupidity units of coffee. And their new CEO has a commute in excess of 1600km!
Even if I enjoyed coffee, I would find somewhere else to spend my money.
Starbucks isn’t Italian, for one.
My father has reached an age where money means very little to him and his interest in “proper” furniture has skyrocketed. He will go out and buy a simple table for $3k-5k and tell me how the same model was bought for the American embassy in year x, or send me links to matching chairs by designer y.
I’ve yet to see a piece of furniture that’s worth twice the price of what you can find on IKEA. A table needs to be water/stain resistant and that’s about that. /rant
My grandfather was a high-end carpenter and furniture maker. He made some really nice cabinets and tables. He taught my dad all about both how to determine good quality furniture and how to make it. But my dad was not a carpenter, so quite a lot of the latter information was lost on him. What he did remember he (my dad) relayed to me. But I have only retained parts of what he relayed. Determining good vs bad quality furniture though? I remember most of that.
So now when I am looking at a new piece of furniture I can see whether it’s well or badly made. And let me tell you, the furniture made today is absolute shite quality unless you want to pay a lot for it. If you just want something for the next few years that’s fine. But if you want something to last (especially something that lasts the onslaught of abuse kids put it through), that’s a problem. But can I made such furniture? Hell no! All I can do is see the poor quality of most modern furniture and lament it. It’s a bit of a shit situation to be in, honestly.
That said, there’s still some really older good stuff available at second hand and thrift stores, and at estate sales. And it’s usually available for a good price.
It’s frustrating trying to find a good mid-range furniture store. It seems like you’re either buying stuff dirt cheap or spending a fortune, with little in between.
Woodworker here. Do I detect an under-served market segment?
I personally dislike 4 inch thick slab river tables as much as I dislike particle board bookshelves that bow under their own weight, and I’m perfectly happy to build $200 shaker end tables out of pine.
D-A-CH only, but Pfister makes solid wood, high quality furniture. Costs twice as much tho.
I got a table and some chairs from Torbjørn Afdal, Darby series that’s designed in the 1960s with Brazilian Rosewood. It’s not too expensive at ~2000€ and it’s a nice, well built table, and extendable for when you host an event, but having to worry about damaging the table vs some IKEA table you don’t really care about makes me prefer cheap furniture just for the ease of mind.
Okay, but if I compare my Ingo to Pfister’s Riverside the first thing I notice is this:
I very early on made a very conscious decision that I wouldn’t put much effort into keeping it in pristine condition and would instead allow it to develop some character; if some liquid leaves a stain by embedding itself into the wood, then that would be a part of the tables story. Burnmarks? The same. And not only does that attitude make you much more relaxed, it gives the table character and it has been dealing with it very well. When I wanted to have a power-strip in the middle of the room I just screwed it to the underside of the table and brought the cable with some cable-holders that I nailed into it, to one of its feet and have been extremely happy with that ever since.
Very few people, and I am very much not one of them, would be comfortable taking that kind of approach with a ≈1000€ table and I can assure you that I would be less happy for it.
And yes, I care about the table being reasonably durable (which it is), but it being cheap is a feature beyond price too, and the largely untreated pine from which it is made is something that I like: I really enjoyed the smell that it had when it was still new.
I’m more interested in avoiding plastic as much as I can. Having plastic infused pressed sawdust wrapped in plastic veneer is very unappealing to me.
Ya this is true. Ikea desks/tabletops are pretty garbo.
Ikea does have some nice solid wood furniture, but it’s not cheap. If you’re not okay with spending 5 times as much, you’re getting MDF garbage.
I have had a table from K-Mart for at least 10 years. Every 3 years I sand the top and restain it and it keeps on doing table things like a champ.
My kitchen table is a hand me down from my parents, is at least 30 years old, never been maintained, and even has a nice big scar in it from a science experiment gone wrong (my dad sanctioned it so it’s mostly his fault. He underestimated the potency of what he helped me make). It still works like a champ.
I’ve been wanted to sand and restain it for a while though. If nothing else so I can actually make the surface level again. Even bought the supplies. But I’m lazy and other things have taken priority. Like commenting on Lemmy.
Just checking, what product do you “stain” your table with?
Pepsi
Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!
The one on the left is built to last longer, and is practically timeless. The one on the right will probably fall apart after a few years of use, and eschews fucntion for a more “modern” design that will inevitably fall out of style.
(Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this.)
I have some ikea pieces that I bought when I started grad school. They’re 10 years old, have been through 4 moves, and they’re still doing fine. Even better, I could move them myself without it being a huge strain. They aren’t high quality (which tends to seem to mean heavy and not disassemblable), but they’ve treated me pretty well.
I have several IKEA pieces that I bought when I arrived in Canada in 2007 and are still going strong.
Same. My collection of cheap ass MDF / particleboard furniture has survived 4 moves and 10 years lol
Idk the one on the right seems more like it’s throwing out any kind of style to be purely for function
sad white furniture for sad white homes
May have mixed feelings about the “timeless” bit, depending deeply on how it’s meant. Do I think you’ll find a buyer at any given time in the foreseeable future? Probably, yes. But I would have very mixed feelings about having that in my house. (Space consumption, cool on its own to some degree but clashing with basically everything else and cherubs are not my jam, maybe a status symbol since it isn’t the norm.)
No wooden babies in my bedroom tyvm
One on the left is very sophisticated and whoever made it, definitely put in countless hours sculpting it. People downvoting thinking the one on the right is better are batshit insane.
If I want a work of art the left one is nice, but if I just want a fucking shelf you’re insane to think it’s the better option there. You really can’t compare the two, they serve completely separate purposes
I’d 100% prefer the one on the right. Just dusting the thing on the left would take forever, and moving it would be a gigantic pain in the ass.
I have already decided the one my grandparents left me is sitting there until the house burns down or I die. I’m not moving it again.
Ikea’s stuff is fine for the price you pay. Oddly enough their solid pine items are really sturdy and usually among the cheapest since it’s so simple and comes unfinished. I have a Tarva queen sized bed and it’s great, plus I bought $8 of 2x2 and made custom length legs for it.
The one on the left wasn’t necessarily built to last longer. It was probably absurdly expensive back in the day and there were plenty of more cheaply made(but admittedly solid wood) options. No one is taking pictures of those less flashy pieces, though. Also you say timeless but, c’mon, it’s cool and all but definitely doesn’t fit everywhere. It screams “medieval castle” and is pretty over-the-top for basically any modern home, even grandma’s place.
The other thing about those shelves is that they’re a lot lighter than solid wood. When you want to place them in fun locations and need to use drywall anchors it’s a big thing to reduce the weight where you can. It’s not like people are displaying bowlingballs in them. They last a plenty long time unless you have a habit of trashing your place and there’s certainly such a thing as “over-built”. If that shelf “inevitably falls out of style” then style moves slower than I thought because they’ve been making and selling that thing for-fuckin’-ever. Most importantly it’s affordable in today’s world where executives have siphoned away all our money and the working class has been left without the funds to invest in quality furniture when the Ikea stuff does just fine.
—
TL;DR the piece on the left was not common when it was made and the piece on the right has its merits, not least of which is accessibility.
As someone who’s moved a several tons of the furniture on the left, I’ll take the shit on the right all day. Not only is the shit on the left always incredibly heavy, it’s also ugly as hell and takes up an ungodly amount of space
One thing for sure, is way easier to carry
And dust
easier to use too
The one on the left is definitely more haunted, though.
“This is yours now, son. A little bit of water spilled on it 3 weeks ago, so it will fall apart if you use it.”
Or, “this was a table when it began the long journey from my house to yours, but it couldn’t handle the vibrations of the journey (or didn’t appreciate being disassembled so that it wouldn’t have to stand up to the vibrations), so I now bequeath you this pile of fine wood (fine as in the pieces of wood used are very small)!”
Though, tbf, that hasn’t been my experience with IKEA furniture I’ve gotten. But it has been with the cheap Canadian Tire furniture I’ve gotten. Worst part is that it’s not even priced lower than the IKEA stuff. So now I’m willing to drive almost 2h to get to the nearest IKEA if I don’t feel like paying the even more ridiculous prices for the decent furniture sold at furniture stores.
That totally leads to Narnia
Where does the IKEA one lead?
The Wall-E world
The self checkout line in a Walmart after an especially hot summer day.
Will there be mythical creatures there too?
Nørniä obviously
Now I finally understand the naming conventions at Ikea
A Target in Modesto
Yeah but does the one on the left fit a rack server? I think not!
The one on the left can probably fit the very first rack server.
If cheap furniture made by compressing glue and sawdust together existed 100 years ago, I bet it would have sold well.
Same goes for shoes. Everyone’s wearing terrible plastic stuff nowadays.
Removed by mod
I wonder why simple shoes (like a piece of wood and some cord) picked up in the East but not in the West.
They were picked up in the West as well, but not as well known probably because they weren’t viewed as fashionable. They’re called Pattens FYI
Patten (shoe) - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patten_(shoe)
Dutch are known for their wooden clogs, no?
Yes, but both that and the style linked in the other comment are more complex than the Japanese style sandals. They are just boards with some holes drilled and knotted cord put through the holes. Some have two other pieces of wood underneath them to raise them off the ground a bit (maybe they work better in mud?).
They look like something you could take an afternoon and make enough new ones for your whole family, if you’ve got some wooden planks and cord.
Clogs look like they’d each take a while to carve and would require more skill to craft.
Though I don’t know how common either of those were among the poorest of each region.
People bought mail order houses, which I think confirms the popularity of lightweight and portable big purchase items.
My grandparents deliberately saved up for the expensive oak furniture. It was meant to last the rest of their lives (which it did). They had a different mindset than me and you who want something nice looking that doesn’t burden the bank account too much
That and I didn’t want to buy solid oak furniture when I lived in apartments and had to move on a dime because the landlord wanted to jack up rent or pull something… Again.
Chipboard was one of those things invented twice simultaneously during WWII, as the Germans and Americans looked around for resources to exploit and noticed the massive amounts of sawdust they had piling up. Chipboard cabinetry and furniture starts to emerge in the 1950’s. Ikea was founded in 1943 and started selling furniture in 1948. So cheap particle board furniture existed ~80 years ago, and did indeed sell well.
Meh, the cost of each is vastly different
