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Discussion (45 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).
I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.
If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.
Now that you have published this online, police will visit you to remove the Billy!
Perhaps I am too pessimistic with German laws.
PS: It looks much better this way.
Now I will either get older recycled furniture for quality or pieces from IKEA for cost.
I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.
I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.
If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
We have furniture from IKEA that we bought at least five years ago that still functions great. A mattress we got from them is absolutely stellar with a memory foam topper; all of our guests love it. I think our coffee table is ten years old now.
However, everything goes to hell once you try to take it apart. This is why our mattresses are not on IKEA bed frames. Taking them apart has ALWAYS weakened them significantly. (We use Thuma Japanese joinery bed frames, which are AMAZING for moving and very high quality).
Which is kind of moot when you're talking about high-quality furniture, as they are usually single pieces as well.
https://erinkestenbaum.com/2018/12/12/hacking-the-ikea-pax-i...
How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.
Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.
Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.
> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.
But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.
But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).
(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)
Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.
Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.
I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)
Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.
But CNC isn't the silver bullet. What I ended up with is 25mm glued wood for frames, 55mm for tops and 15mm plywood plus veneer for facades.
If you use 19mm for frames, you won't have enough strength for hinges, which would inevitably be abused.
If you use 19mm for tops, they will sag and vibrate. The best top I have is actually 55mm IKEA glued oak.
ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.
After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.
I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.
As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.
Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.
Ever since then, I avoid sharing pictures of IKEA furniture. Like Mattel, suing barbie blogs of children. If I did not design it, I won't share a picture of it. Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
? In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place). In the there's the assumption you can photograph anything without a 'do not photo, military dogs' etc. Never heard of a non-publishable building. Even gchq can be photo's.