Why's everybody baggin' on IKEA?

[Chris Friesen]

Some Ikea stuff is solid wood, although it's often laminated up from smaller pieces. This could be viewed as recycling scraps.

I just bought two large loosely-shaker dressers from there because we have a new baby and I won't have time to make new dressers for quite a while. The funny thing is that the black-brown stained version is all solid wood, but the white painted version is mostly particleboard and fiberboard. It's definitely not solid cherry, but at $300 instead of $7000, I'll take it.

Someday I'll build the cherry version though...

[Dewey Torres]

It may just be me but most of their furniture I find slightly undersized for my taste. The housewares items section usually had good deals though.

[Richard Niemiec]

Alrighty then, I live somewhere where we don't have an IKEA. I've been into one twice. I don't understand the virulent disdain that so many on here have for them.

What's the beef?

The stuff is built "just good enough" to sell, and sells cheaply, which works for some folks who have the need furnish a home but not the bank account, and god bless as it fills a marketing niche.

But for anyone who can make furniture, or who knows the difference between well and poorly made goods, IKEA stuff just doesn't cut it, and never will. Lets face it, cheap is cheap. Sort of like Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, if it sounds too good to be true, it's not. Somebody earlier put their finger on it, "IKEA = Landfill with a photo finish." YMMV.

[Tom Esh]

One particular Seinfeld episode did it for me. Since then I've never been able to look at the stuff without exclaiming "Aye! KEA!"

[fRED mCnEILL]

A friend had to remodel here kitchen due to frozen pipes and water damage. Ikea cabinets came in at less that 1/2 comparable competitor. And she had it within a week. The trick is figuring our what you need. It is quite involved to get it right. But if you like the Ikea style(which I don't) there is nothing wrong with it.

In my mind anything other than solid wood is bogus for kitchen cabinets. But I think that most commercial carcases are NOT solid wood. So that puts me in the minority.

Fred Mc.

[Jeffrey Makiel]

A month or so ago I saw a Cragslist add, Ikea...Furniture assembler.

50 bucks a hour. Two hour minimum.

Hey, that's great. I mean whats your overhead? A screwdriver?

Tough times.

Per

Per,
Assembly usually requires an allen wrench. And... it's provided with the furniture.

-Jeff

[Scott Wigginton]

Per,
Assembly usually requires an allen wrench. And... it's provided with the furniture.

-Jeff

Like a furniture happy meal, new tool included!

Hmm.. sounds like most of the projects I build anyway ... honey, you know that edge profile you love so much for that table? I'm off to the store to get it just for you

[Paul Steiner]

Per,
Assembly usually requires an allen wrench. And... it's provided with the furniture.

-Jeff

This is sad but true, several times in college I picked up beer money assembling ikea/walmart furniture. $20 at the most. But IKEA is landfill furniture and if you don't believe it go to any college town the second week of May. Ikea furniture on curbs, broken into pieces in trash cans, thrown in dumpsters, or just left in the dorm or apartment where the student lived. It May last a few years but it all ends up in the landfill.

[John Schreiber]

I think it's the difference between furniture you buy for today vs. furniture you buy for a lifetime and more. Ikea has attractive well designed well built disposable furniture.

I think it's bad for the soul to live in a disposable world.

Like others have said, their prices are incredible for what you get and that pushes down the price people think furniture should cost. It is frustrating when I can't get materials for what they sell a whole piece for.

[Rod Sheridan]

OK, I'll step up and say the heretical on a woodworking forum.

IKEA furniture is excellent.

Now that you've had time to stop laughing, or are wondering what I'm smoking, here's my rational.

1) The design is outstanding. Proportion, functionality, surface treatment are all excellent looking.

2) Engineering. It has outstanding engineering, from material utilization, simplicity of design, optimized strength for expected loads, it's engineering excellence.

3) Preservation of resources, face it, most of it is made of the stuff we empty out of our cyclones. It uses a minimum of solid wood, veneer or foil on the remainder.
Much of the Ikea furniture lasts a while (transient students excepted), so it may be more resource respectful than that stool for the workshop you made out of the last piece of unobtanium on the planet.

4) Some of it is made in America ( I watched a show on the new Ikea factory in Virginia??). The factory esentially saved the ex tobacco town from ruin.

Wait a minute, if it's made in Virginia that does make it imported crap!!!!

So, it's not that I want a living room full of Ikea furniture, however it does have many positive aspects.

The breakfasts, lingonberry jam and roll mops are great too.

regards, Rod.

[Mike Parzych]

I believe they're becoming the new Pottery Barn. Used to bne you weren't really a woodworker until somebody asked if you could build them something they saw at Pottery barn.....and do it cheaper, by the way.

[Chris Tsutsui]

My first post and it's to say that as a "hobbyest" I have nothing against ikea.

People that can afford fine woodworking KNOW the quality difference between a particle board laminate dresser, compared to a solid wood dresser with dovetail drawers on high end guides.

It's just sad that Ikea is putting a lot of shops out of business. The only thing good about them is they ARE satisfying many people with providing designer furnture for the best bang per buck. It may not be heirloom quality, but as long as people keep buying, they will continue to dominate that market.

Still, I will gladly make myself fine furniture because people still appreciate craftsmanship when they see it.

In the long run, I just hope that Ikea doesn't harm the "culture" of fine woodworking and discourage too many woodworkers and/or put too many small shops out of business...

[Brian Kent]

A lot of its utility can be found if you shop there in August. I used to see wall to wall students looking for dorm structures they could afford.

I recognize the frustration of trying to compete against their prices if you are building life-time furniture.

[Dave Cav]

I pretty much agree with Rod and some others, and in fact my entire master bedroom is done with Ikea furniture. About seven years ago we moved into a new house. The master BR is about 3X as big as the old one, and our old BR furniture was REALLY crap. At that time I still didn't have my shop set up and I didn't have time to make a whole bedroom full of stuff- two dressers, a bed, armiore and a couple of bookcases. We went to Ikea (the only time I recall having gone there) and found some decent, solid (sort of) pine stuff. The sides are made of glued up smaller pieces, but everything matched, the build quality was decent, and all the drawers and doors all still work fine after seven years. The price was reasonable, and it did a good job of filling up the room. It's not "fine furniture" and I'm sure I'll eventually get around to replacing it, but I have a sideboard and a full set of Mission office furniture that are going to get done first.

Back in the late '70s we bought some knocked down "Danish Modern" furniture. It wasn't cheap, and it was teak veneer, but it went together with QD fittings, and after a couple of years it was falling apart. It made the Ikea stuff look like heirloom quality furniture.

Rod- PM me about your Airhead!

[Larry Edgerton]

I have never seen an IKEA store.......