this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Dad Jokes
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i like this joke.
i have bought furniture from ikea, and they all have eight screws and take five minutes to put together.
is the idea of difficult Ikea furniture assembly solely created by stand-up comedians or did assembly used to be genuinely more difficult?
I've owned plenty of Ikea in my life and it kinda just depends. Most of it's well-designed but poorly machined so the more complex it is, the more likely you are to get two dowel holes that only barely line up or a screw hole that wasn't drilled. Most times, you'll encounter no issues at all. And other times, you'll be like me and have to deal with the Norberg, a bastard of a shelf that took me, an experienced woodworker with an entire shop of tools at my disposal, two days and three different screw types to hang on the wall.
Got it, thanks.
Good for you for sticking with it.
Oof! That’s rough. With a full shop you Could build it from scratch in half the time. Can’t beat the price, though…
Yeah, it's definitely a trope of stand up comedy, with couples breaking up, and never having any proper tools on hand (using a kitchen knife instead of a screwdriver).
People say "IKEA" as a shortcut to saying flatpack furniture in general. Actual IKEA brand stuff is pretty good, but I've assembled some horrible stuff from other brands.
I've assembled a bed from Emma (German brand) that took me 3 days to assemble.
It was awful. It did not have instructions In it, just a QR code that redirect on a websitz with ALL the manuals. Then when you find your bed you have to naviagte between 10 different versions depending of the options you have, they all look similar but have different assembly.
Then when you finally assembled your first corner, you think it will be easy for the other 3 but no, they used a totally different assembly method for the next corner for no reason.
Instead of the 40 identical length dowel pins I had 50 pins in 3 different sizes, knowing that the longest don't fit in all holes so if you only use the shorts one at the end you are stuck with the long one you can't use.
....
This was pure garbage, IKEA on the other is so satisfying to assemble.
ohh i didn't know that, that makes these comments more understandable.
thanks
I find them easy but IKEA furniture is pretty simple compared to a decent size Lego set.
Boy a hundred percent of this. I have given up on lego sets but i can put together furniture hungover without the proper tools
I think Ikea furniture has become synonymous with all pre-fab, assemble your self furniture.
In my personal expirence with larger items (non-ikea) like desks, the assembly itself is super easy. The time consuming part is sorting out 100 pieces and realizing towards the end that the picture book didn't tell you one part had a specific direction to go.
good point, someone else pointed that people might be saying ikea when they mean any flatpack.
second good point on the sheer number of pieces. I've swapped bolts putting together a bedframe.
thanks.
Some people don’t have good spatial reasoning skills and/or suck at reading and following instructions.
Fair point, though spacial reasoning and following instructions can be developed, i don't think they're have-it-or-you-don't situations.
I'm sure people who aren't naturally gifted at those skills get frustrated more quickly.
back to the original question, have you put together any Ikea furniture and do you find it genuinely difficult or do you think it used to be more difficult in the past?
I don’t buy ikea because i prefer things that last. We already have tons of waste as a species. I don’t need to add more to it than necessary.
Ikea has several things that last. My desk is 20 years old and still solid as a tank, I have a shelf and two small tables that are 30 years old, my mom had a bookshelf that was over 30 years and in good shape when she sold it. You just have to avoid the flimsy crap.
I think Ikea makes a point out of being sustainable.
also, their products last decades.
I've only ever got maybe one Ikea table and it was used, but if your main concerns are sustainability and waste, those are two shortcomings Ikea doesn't bear.
Particle board by its very nature is going to last decades less than normal wood. So yes, ikea is wasteful.
you're drawing false conclusions from incorrect assumptions and half-truths.
What about a cheap, biodegradable upcycled material that lasts for decades screams wasteful to you?
Many of their products are sustainably sourced solid wood.
you obviously don't know about the company's sustainability processes.
At least learn how they source their material and what they do with their products at the end of their life cycle instead of pretending they're scary because... they use upcycled materials and are committed to net zero waste.
with so many actually wasteful and harmful companies, you are screaming at a windmill here.
I don't agree with how he's been responding so far, but I've got some Ikea that's over 20 years and 10 house moves (three coast-to-coast) old. One piece has stood up really well.
In general, though, as the son of a cabinet maker's son with no ability whatsoever, I can easily see these pieces are sub-par. Beaver-chow with the cheap veneer throughout, so a drop of water spells eventually doom for them; or just thin, thin real wood.
My mom has downsized recently, and the only pieces of furniture she has now are the handed-down wooden desk and tables and whatnot you'd expect; but they're all 200 years old.
Ikea may last a decade or two, but they are cheap materials that we cannot reasonably expect to last much longer than 2 years or a house move. In that way, they're incredibly wasteful.
In the same sense that cheap fares have driven up the cost of real seats as luxuries and also cheapened the in-flight options and the entire experience of flying, Ikea's cheap goods have pushed the price of real equivalents up into the stratosphere, and has cheapened everything about acquiring furniture to keep and use for generations.
I understand the abstract logical connection, but I'm unfamiliar with practical data and statistics on airfare increasing in cost as a result of lower priced tickets, or chairs being prohibitively expensive because Ikea makes chairs., and am interested in reading the data.
in my anecdotal experience, airfares are getting cheaper directly as a result of budget airlines, and I travel quite a bit by air.
I get all of my furniture second hand, so I really don't have any anecdote experience about for furniture haha.
I still don't see the connection between Ikea products using sustainably sourced wood and being wasteful, either.
using upcycled and sustainable materials is responsible and resourceful, rather than wasteful.
It depends on where the particle board comes from. If it's from good solid wood pieces being ground up to be glued together, then yeah I'd agree that's wasteful.
If it's from wood that isn't otherwise usable (like scraps from things made from hardwood, wood that isn't suitable for making furniture (like too soft), or pieces of trees that are too small, that's the opposite of wasteful. It can also be a way to effectively use fast turnaround tree farms which IMO is better than logging established trees at an industrial scale.
Edit: looks like I forgot to do this: ).
They seem to have two levels of furniture; the flimsy, mostly made of particle board/cardboard and hope stuff, and the solid wood stuff. The latter is as robust any anything you'll get elsewhere, even assembled, just easier to get home and takes some assembly. I suspect it's mostly that that lasts, although even the lightweight stuff holds up well if you're carefully with it.
Ikea's fine as long as you're managing expectations and using them appropriately. My general rule of thumb is that I wouldn't buy anything from them that I put my weight on, but I've used my KALLAX for almost two decades and about a dozen moves across the country and it's been sturdier than some $1,000+ organizers I've owned