this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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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