Price range for retail seems to be $100-250 for IKEA stuff that will fall apart in 3 years, or $1,000+ for something better. Is there nothing in between? Would prefer to buy new with risk of bed bugs or other contaminants but open to other options if I’m missing something.
Habitat for Humanity, estate sales, garage sales, or build your own.
There’s also cruising affluent neighborhoods around the time the trash company picks up large items. For the low low price of embarrassment, you can get quality stuff for free.
Ikea makes garbage furniture, but I consider them adequate for a dresser for my needs. Not for anything that touches your body during use (such as a sofa). Only items for storage. Well, we have a two-person table and pair of chairs for the kitchen, so I guess I broke my one rule. How about this: not for comfort or relaxing.
Try thrift stores. A surprising amount of solid wood furniture ends up being resold. You might need to do some fixing up if you’re handy - sanding down and refinishing - but usually not. Usually some pretty big pieces for really cheap.
Not sure why IKEA is getting knocked? It has a good reputation for quality design. They also have quality ranges with cheaper and more expensive versions of the same furniture types if you want to splurge on the best.
Flat pack is a good way to buy furniture; you just have to get it from good quality sources and IKEA is definitely one.
I’ve got IKEA furniture that’s moved with me from home to home up to 15 years old and it remains in good condition. Never known their furniture to “fall apart”?
To add to this, if you compare a dresser (or table or whatever) at ikea to a piece of the same price range from pretty much anywhere else, it’s almost absurd how much better quality the IKEA piece will be. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s absurd how crappy the non-IKEA piece will be.
Seriously, go to a furniture store and look at the drawer construction and hardware on a $1000 dresser and compare that to a $400 IKEA dresser.
There is definitely some garbage at the bottom of their price ranges, but their mid range stuff is generally a solid value.
Ikea stuff, at least on the cheap end, is made of cardboard lattice coated in plastic. Maybe if you get more expensive stuff from particle board, or even plywood, you’d be better off, but that cheapest stuff is really cheap. Once the fasteners start to loosen, there’s nothing you can really do. With real wood, you could just put in a fastener in a different spot.
And is still cheaper than what you’ll find at most competing stores. Cheaper as in price, not quality. I need to drive about an hour and a half to the nearest IKEA, so I’ve looked at other options when I think of some new furniture that could improve my space use. I’m always disappointed in both the selection available and the price on the not quite what I have in mind but closest they’ve got.
Dovetails and rabbets are going to be way more than $1000 without some serious bargain hunting and luck.
I just had to refurnish my whole house and it’s disgusting how much is being asked for shitty pressboard furniture.
At least IKEA is charging pressboard prices for pressboard furniture (and a decent array of solid softwood furniture as well). And in my experience it holds up better than most if you’re not abusing it or moving every year.
I have a lot of IKEA stuff. My complaint is materials. It’s almost impossible to buy something there that doesn’t have some components made of particle board. Recently, I’ve been trying to find better quality stuff.
So Ikea has different qualities as well. Something like Hemnes is made of pine instead of particle board. Those will last quite a while. On the other hand pine is a soft wood so those more expensive hardwood models at the top end you mentioned will last a lifetime.
Ikea is for some reason completely out of stock on dressers at the moment. We were just there last week looking at them and everything is “temporarily out of stock” even on the website.
Thrift stores like goodwill in the nicer part of towns. You wont always find something good or something that matches your room. But you can find a lot of well kept furniture and clothes for cheap. People who are more well off tend to donate the things they replace in order to get receipt for tax right offs. Ive never personaly gotten furniture at one, but i know friends and family who have. The biggest thing i got was a full set of travel bags 3 good size good brand for 60 dollars. Ive had them for over ten years and they’re still in good shape. The other great deal i know of was when my aunt got a beautiful comfy sectional for 200. Had to make three separate trips to move all the pieces but it worked out fine. Just took like 5 hours.
I’ve got plenty of flat pack furniture and never had to use wood glue.
If you buy quality flat pack you will get well designed and engineered furniture. The bad reputation comes from cheap tat, often mass produced in China.
Wood glue negates one of the big benefits of flat pack - to take the furniture apart and move it at any point in the future.
I’ve also come across shoddily built flat pack furniture when I was renting when younger and I always found the same problem - a failure to tighten screws. Wobbly bits of furniture became functional afterwards.
I remember my mum built a flat pack computer table when I was a kid and it wobbled all over. She lamented how poor flat pack furniture was. I got fed up of the wobble when I was a teenager and had a look - every single screw was not tightened. It took 10mins to sort and the thing never wobbled again.
I’ve fixed wobbly desks, wardrobes, shelving units - all with just a screwdriver.
Number one tip for flat pack furniture: tighten the screws. And number 2, get an electric screwdriver.
The problem you’ll run into is that good furniture is made out of solid hardwoods, and IKEA, et al. is made from particleboard. There are major differences in the ways you work with the two materials; there’s not really a great inexpensive way to make hardwood furniture that’s going to last for 50+ years, and there’s no reasonable way to make particleboard furniture last 50+ years at all. (Plywood lasts longer than particleboard, but I wouldn’t use it in making furniture that I intended to be around long after my death.) I am, for instance, a big fan of Gustav Stickley’s “Mission” style; I absolutely can not afford it, since a full bedroom set would cost about as much or more than a brand new BMW M3. OTOH, my grandfather made some craftsman style furniture (Stickley published a lot of the early plans) in the 20’s, and my parents–in their 80s–still have it, and it’s still in very good condition overall.
I just need to get a cabinet saw, thickness planer, replace the blades on my jointer, pick up a bandsaw, and find a good Powermatic mortising machine–and get my basement wired for 440v 3ph–and I can start making my own. And that would still be cheaper than buying it at full retail. :')
Not really. It’s very, very limited. Some of the shelving is solid wood (mostly their utility shelves, and those are pine), they used to have a bent wood chair that was laminated hardwood, they have the wooden countertops, and that covers most of it. Most other things are plywood with veneer, particle board, or even something close to cardboard with and MDF and veneer shell (the Malm bedframe is one that I remember being made like that).
Yeah, you have to get pretty spendy to get solid wood. Even “nice” furniture is often hardwood plywood with a veneer. The way to check is to see if the side and end grain matches with what you see on the face. If the growth rings don’t line up, it’s a veneer.
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