Confirmation bias: all the shite furniture from 1800s has rotted to dust already
Edit for full disclosure: I've exclusively bought antique furniture. I'm basically a shill for big-auction
I think it's survivorship bias, but yes
Sure. A lot has rotted away, but much modern furniture is designed with so much MDF and other manufactured wood products that aren't resilient in the least. Moisture will destroy them, they take gashes super easy, and are soft wood.
I'd think the furniture our grandparents had would be more likely to have been solid wood.
That's not to say there aren't solid hardwood pieces being made today. But they are extremely expensive and are competing in a space with poor regulation of descriptions and all the flat pack Chinese imported stuff thats literally 10% of the price of good furniture that will last.
Solid hardwood furniture is a luxury.
Balsa is hardwood Yew is softwood
Yew is 16x stronger
I bought a modern well made dresser from some exotic wood, cost me roughly €900 amd it got damaged after moving but i haven't taken the time to repair it as it's only visual.
That thing is solid af, it has more hidden supports than it needs. I could probably park a car on top and it would withstand the weight. (Obv. i haven't tested that lol)
We went shopping for a tv cabinet and 99% turned out to be particle board but they still had the audacity to charge between €1200 and €1800 euro's.
I saw a headline that Ikea was considering a rental program because there's a cultural understanding that flat packed* furniture especially that made of veneered chipboard is disposable.
And yeah at least Ikea puts in some effort to make their furniture decent. Much of what you find at retailers is just chip board shit, bookcases that'll collapse under the weight of actual books, etc.
My strategy is, I'm a woodworker. I'm slowly replacing anything cheap and crap in my life with oak, cherry and walnut.
*had to correct myself from saying flatpak there, Linux has me trained.
Also the one from their grandma cost 3 months wage at the time and they probably got it as their wedding gift. Totally comparable to 25$ worth of composite 👍
Part of the problem with those antique pieces is that they're a bitch to move.
Here's a picture of the furniture my grandparents left me:
Nice floor tho
My grandparents didn't even update their will when my sister and I were born.
Neither did my grandparents. Likewise, my parents didn't update their will when my children and nieces were born.
The attitude among all generations has been: your own kids inherit, and they distribute to their kids as they see fit.
I wasn't in my grandparents wills, but I ended up with some of their furniture.
If you actually have good parents, there is no need to. Unless you're over 18 the money typically goes to your parents anyway.
A whole a house or just this room?
Anyway: Amazing.
All I got was the IKEA family card. Free coffee. Yeah.
One thing for sure, is way easier to carry
And dust
easier to use too
If cheap furniture made by compressing glue and sawdust together existed 100 years ago, I bet it would have sold well.
Same goes for shoes. Everyone's wearing terrible plastic stuff nowadays.
My grandparents deliberately saved up for the expensive oak furniture. It was meant to last the rest of their lives (which it did). They had a different mindset than me and you who want something nice looking that doesn't burden the bank account too much
That and I didn't want to buy solid oak furniture when I lived in apartments and had to move on a dime because the landlord wanted to jack up rent or pull something... Again.
People bought mail order houses, which I think confirms the popularity of lightweight and portable big purchase items.
Chipboard was one of those things invented twice simultaneously during WWII, as the Germans and Americans looked around for resources to exploit and noticed the massive amounts of sawdust they had piling up. Chipboard cabinetry and furniture starts to emerge in the 1950's. Ikea was founded in 1943 and started selling furniture in 1948. So cheap particle board furniture existed ~80 years ago, and did indeed sell well.
Im leaving my grandkids a very cleanly optimized starter base in Factorio.
That's an amazing gift
That's very thoughtful.
“This is yours now, son. A little bit of water spilled on it 3 weeks ago, so it will fall apart if you use it.”
Or, "this was a table when it began the long journey from my house to yours, but it couldn't handle the vibrations of the journey (or didn't appreciate being disassembled so that it wouldn't have to stand up to the vibrations), so I now bequeath you this pile of fine wood (fine as in the pieces of wood used are very small)!"
Though, tbf, that hasn't been my experience with IKEA furniture I've gotten. But it has been with the cheap Canadian Tire furniture I've gotten. Worst part is that it's not even priced lower than the IKEA stuff. So now I'm willing to drive almost 2h to get to the nearest IKEA if I don't feel like paying the even more ridiculous prices for the decent furniture sold at furniture stores.
Too exhausted to grab images but...
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The amount I spent on college versus the amount that they spent on college
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their pension versus my pension
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cost of their home versus cost of my home
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amount of adults in their household that had to work to support a family versus amount of adults in my household that have to work to support a family
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Their CEO pay gap versus my CEO pay gap
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number of summers where they took a week-long family vacation versus number of summers that I took a week-long family vacation
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cost of a family trip to Disney for them versus no fucking way I could even consider affording that shit, let alone paying an overall subscription for quicker lines and somehow also individual extra charges per ride to get on those rides in less than three hours.
Re:costs, costs always go up. But relative costs are still crazy worse.
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I mean, not anytime soon, but hopefully eventually.
Now, I'm not sure what you do for a living, but personally, as a software engineer, I know that most people in my career line usually end up as either carpenters or farmers as their career peak. I'm more partial to the farming branch myself, but if you go carpenter, you can leave your grandkids some fancy ass furniture.
You mean one portal to hell vs one support call line to Sweden.
The Lion, the Witch, and the SMÅGÖRA
The Blåhaj, the Witch, and the Smågöra
What's the difference?
I've actually never found a name of an IKEA product to be fake. They can be obscure, odd, and some would normally be split. But never truly fake. Though, FEJKA does mean "to fake". Which is an honest name for a series of fake plants.
Yeah, don't know what that "fake" is all about. It's a Swedish company that gives Swedish names to their product lines and actually seems to care about maintaining their reputation for good design instead of enshitification so they can gouge their loyal customers until they realize they shouldn't be loyal anymore.
Though I do wonder why I don't mind IKEA's Swedish product names but find Starbucks' use of Italian words for cup sizes to be insufferable...
Starbucks isn't Italian, for one.
Starbucks sizes aren't really descriptive. Tall is the small size and the only one named in English, grande means large in Italian but is actually the medium-sized cup, and venti means twenty in Italian which is meant to be twenty ounces but the name doesn't tell you how big it is compared to the other sizes. It's dumb.
Because everyone else uses "small, medium, large" and it's annoying to have to switch when that's something you commonly use. Whereas furniture lines often have made up or creative names because companies need some names to differentiate the 20 different dining room tables they sell. Other retailers might use "the classic collection" and "the modern collection" or whatever. But it's not standardized like small, medium, and large.
I've never been to a Starbucks. But from the content I see about them online, they do seem like a typical American fakery outlet.
Venti, that's twenty in Italian, is a cup of twenty American stupidity units of coffee. And their new CEO has a commute in excess of 1600km!
Even if I enjoyed coffee, I would find somewhere else to spend my money.
The only thing my kids will inherit from me is ADHD.
My father has reached an age where money means very little to him and his interest in "proper" furniture has skyrocketed. He will go out and buy a simple table for $3k-5k and tell me how the same model was bought for the American embassy in year x, or send me links to matching chairs by designer y.
I've yet to see a piece of furniture that's worth twice the price of what you can find on IKEA. A table needs to be water/stain resistant and that's about that. /rant
My grandfather was a high-end carpenter and furniture maker. He made some really nice cabinets and tables. He taught my dad all about both how to determine good quality furniture and how to make it. But my dad was not a carpenter, so quite a lot of the latter information was lost on him. What he did remember he (my dad) relayed to me. But I have only retained parts of what he relayed. Determining good vs bad quality furniture though? I remember most of that.
So now when I am looking at a new piece of furniture I can see whether it's well or badly made. And let me tell you, the furniture made today is absolute shite quality unless you want to pay a lot for it. If you just want something for the next few years that's fine. But if you want something to last (especially something that lasts the onslaught of abuse kids put it through), that's a problem. But can I made such furniture? Hell no! All I can do is see the poor quality of most modern furniture and lament it. It's a bit of a shit situation to be in, honestly.
That said, there's still some really older good stuff available at second hand and thrift stores, and at estate sales. And it's usually available for a good price.
I have had a table from K-Mart for at least 10 years. Every 3 years I sand the top and restain it and it keeps on doing table things like a champ.
My kitchen table is a hand me down from my parents, is at least 30 years old, never been maintained, and even has a nice big scar in it from a science experiment gone wrong (my dad sanctioned it so it's mostly his fault. He underestimated the potency of what he helped me make). It still works like a champ.
I've been wanted to sand and restain it for a while though. If nothing else so I can actually make the surface level again. Even bought the supplies. But I'm lazy and other things have taken priority. Like commenting on Lemmy.
D-A-CH only, but Pfister makes solid wood, high quality furniture. Costs twice as much tho.
I got a table and some chairs from Torbjørn Afdal, Darby series that's designed in the 1960s with Brazilian Rosewood. It's not too expensive at ~2000€ and it's a nice, well built table, and extendable for when you host an event, but having to worry about damaging the table vs some IKEA table you don't really care about makes me prefer cheap furniture just for the ease of mind.
Okay, but if I compare my Ingo to Pfister’s Riverside the first thing I notice is this:
I very early on made a very conscious decision that I wouldn’t put much effort into keeping it in pristine condition and would instead allow it to develop some character; if some liquid leaves a stain by embedding itself into the wood, then that would be a part of the tables story. Burnmarks? The same. And not only does that attitude make you much more relaxed, it gives the table character and it has been dealing with it very well. When I wanted to have a power-strip in the middle of the room I just screwed it to the underside of the table and brought the cable with some cable-holders that I nailed into it, to one of its feet and have been extremely happy with that ever since.
Very few people, and I am very much not one of them, would be comfortable taking that kind of approach with a ≈1000€ table and I can assure you that I would be less happy for it.
And yes, I care about the table being reasonably durable (which it is), but it being cheap is a feature beyond price too, and the largely untreated pine from which it is made is something that I like: I really enjoyed the smell that it had when it was still new.
The one on the left took 5 months to make by monks in Tibet slave camps brought to you by China. The one on the right was made in 437.23 seconds by a Tormak 7000 series CNC discombobulizer 2000.
Sounds like an appliance from The Sims.
Reminds me of one of my favourite lines from Lock Stock:
These people don't have any money, they can't even afford new furniture!
Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!
I'm going to take a different view of this for people to consider:
My dad collected a lot of stuff. He wasn't a hoarder because most of the stuff had value, but he had so many collections: Coins, stamps, cigarette cards, movie posters, movie memorabilia, LPs, CDs, DVDs, so many other things.
When he died, I had to deal with it. All of it. And I am not a material goods sort of person overall, so I didn't want most of it. It took me years to sell off what I could. We couldn't even sell off most of the DVDs, LPs and CDs. They ended up either given to friends or to thrift stores. I'm still dealing with it even though he died in 2016. Who wants a life-sized ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin (dog for scale)?
Did I make money from selling it off? Absolutely. It even helped when we needed some money. But it really wasn't worth the near-decade of stress I've had to go through to deal with this stuff and there really is no end in sight.
And now my mom is in her 80s and she has a house full of antique furniture like this which, again, I have no interest in (and no room for at this point).
Do not make your kids deal with this stuff unless they really want to. I said I would deal with it because my mom is just not good at this stuff and my brother lives too far away, but if I would do it again, I would either hire someone to deal with it all for a percentage and wash my hands of the whole thing or tell my dad that he needs to sell it off before he dies.
Instead of having a few items from my dad to really treasure, I ended up with a bunch of shit I didn't want to deal with and it makes the stuff I do want to keep, most of which wouldn't be worth a huge amount anyway, have much less sentimental value to me.
I will say that I picked through my mom's old LP collection and sprang for a player so I could start listening to some of her classic albums. Now I periodically throw on some Springstein or Beetles because its right there and I can. I also picked up a few newer records - the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, Father John Misty - and listen to them, too.
No idea what I'm going to do with my mom's grand piano. She keeps trying to off-load that on me and all I can tell her is "It literally will not fit in the house."
My dad was not into rock music at all. His collection was mostly film soundtracks, classical music and popular music from the 1930s and 1940s.
I like all of those things, but not enough to save the LPs or CDs. I can stream or download any of the ones I really want to listen to and enjoy it just as much, but not have it take up room in my not especially large house.
You have to understand, we're talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs. Some of them were worth something, but most of them were worth pennies. The month I paid more to eBay than I did make any profits, I gave up.
This is just one part of the CD collection when it was still in their house. There were multiple other shelves.
I can't find a picture of the LPs, but imagine a wall of them the size of 1.5 garage doors.
And this is just the music. This doesn't begin to go into all the other stuff.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp. He had a huge collection of first-day covers he had been collecting for my whole life. It went for $400.
Wow, that's quite a knickknack to have around.
How often do you have to explain to visitors that it's Charlie Chaplin and not that other guy?
Never because it's in a box in the garage. I've never been a huge Chaplin fan like my dad was. He's much better when he's serious than when he's trying to be funny. The "look up, Hannah" speech at the end of The Great Dictator is definitely one of the great movie speeches and I highly recommend anyone here who hasn't seen the movie at least read it, but his "kick each other in the pants" style of comedy never appealed to me. I was much more into Keaton.
There are services in the UK where they come and clear the house for free. They take the risk on the value of what is in there.
They left you the closet to Narnia?
Yeah but does the one on the left fit a rack server? I think not!
The one on the left can probably fit the very first rack server.
one is significantly 1) more useful and 2) does not cost $4000 to move next time the shitty apartment you’re renting gets sold to be “renovated” into luxury (cardboard) condos.
Left: useless because it's ugly as hell and won't fit in anywhere. Right: useless because it falls apart if you sneeze at it.
The amount of dust it will collect in all those crevices !!
Just order your maid to dust it twice daily with a feather duster, duh
Actually, the right looks like a Kallax, which are probably the sturdiest item in their catalogue given the walls are like 3cm (1.2 in) thick. I've taken them apart and reassembled them before, and unlike every other piece of Ikea furniture I've done that to, they're actually just as stable and reliable as before.
The one on the left is built to last longer, and is practically timeless. The one on the right will probably fall apart after a few years of use, and eschews fucntion for a more "modern" design that will inevitably fall out of style.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.)
Idk the one on the right seems more like it's throwing out any kind of style to be purely for function
sad white furniture for sad white homes
I have several IKEA pieces that I bought when I arrived in Canada in 2007 and are still going strong.
Same. My collection of cheap ass MDF / particleboard furniture has survived 4 moves and 10 years lol
As someone who's moved a several tons of the furniture on the left, I'll take the shit on the right all day. Not only is the shit on the left always incredibly heavy, it's also ugly as hell and takes up an ungodly amount of space
May have mixed feelings about the "timeless" bit, depending deeply on how it's meant. Do I think you'll find a buyer at any given time in the foreseeable future? Probably, yes. But I would have very mixed feelings about having that in my house. (Space consumption, cool on its own to some degree but clashing with basically everything else and cherubs are not my jam, maybe a status symbol since it isn't the norm.)
No wooden babies in my bedroom tyvm
Ikea’s stuff is fine for the price you pay. Oddly enough their solid pine items are really sturdy and usually among the cheapest since it’s so simple and comes unfinished. I have a Tarva queen sized bed and it’s great, plus I bought $8 of 2x2 and made custom length legs for it.
The one on the left wasn’t necessarily built to last longer. It was probably absurdly expensive back in the day and there were plenty of more cheaply made(but admittedly solid wood) options. No one is taking pictures of those less flashy pieces, though. Also you say timeless but, c’mon, it’s cool and all but definitely doesn’t fit everywhere. It screams “medieval castle” and is pretty over-the-top for basically any modern home, even grandma’s place.
The other thing about those shelves is that they’re a lot lighter than solid wood. When you want to place them in fun locations and need to use drywall anchors it’s a big thing to reduce the weight where you can. It’s not like people are displaying bowlingballs in them. They last a plenty long time unless you have a habit of trashing your place and there’s certainly such a thing as “over-built”. If that shelf “inevitably falls out of style” then style moves slower than I thought because they’ve been making and selling that thing for-fuckin’-ever. Most importantly it’s affordable in today’s world where executives have siphoned away all our money and the working class has been left without the funds to invest in quality furniture when the Ikea stuff does just fine.
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TL;DR the piece on the left was not common when it was made and the piece on the right has its merits, not least of which is accessibility.
I have some ikea pieces that I bought when I started grad school. They're 10 years old, have been through 4 moves, and they're still doing fine. Even better, I could move them myself without it being a huge strain. They aren't high quality (which tends to seem to mean heavy and not disassemblable), but they've treated me pretty well.
One on the left is very sophisticated and whoever made it, definitely put in countless hours sculpting it. People downvoting thinking the one on the right is better are batshit insane.
If I want a work of art the left one is nice, but if I just want a fucking shelf you're insane to think it's the better option there. You really can't compare the two, they serve completely separate purposes
The one on the left is definitely more haunted, though.
Easier to clean I guess
...psshhhhh - as if i'll ever be able to afford kids to someday give me grandkids...
...i'll die destitute and alone in a gutter somewhere and i've made my peace with that...
C U B E
Meh, the cost of each is vastly different
Yes, that is part of the joke.
OMG we're totally twinning
$300 for yours if you wanna help me complete my set?
That Kallax unit survives multiple generations?
It is if you don't overload it's weight capacity. Same goes with most of their stuff. I've owned really nice computer desks and yet the one I love the most cost like $150 from Ikea. It's not needlessly overbuilt, has nice flat edges that are great for clamping things onto like lights, mic arms, etc. and as others have said, it's a million times easier to move.
I have a few and they survived a few moves without a scratch. Love those things
What Douglas Coupland calls semi-disposable Swedish furniture.
Yes! I’d read that phrase long before I ever saw an actual IKEA
Kallax is so easy to move though!
Meh.. I'm not the best woodworker but I'm not terrible. I'd hope by that time I can at least leave them a decent handcrafted stained table or chair or something. No giant frescoes but nice routered edges on solid wood with a good burn+stain and a thick layer of lacquer.
Grandkids? In this economy?!
Another Zeducation fan. I see you.
