You should be able to build most modular furniture using two power tools, some jigs, and raw materials. It's sad that this isn't a common thing.
I recently had to buy an entire house's worth of furniture due to a fire. We shopped every store we could find, and apart from any store that sources from the Amish, its all crap. The prices are obscene. We also got to see the innards of the old burned furniture... there's so much chip-board and laminating that I think there must be more plastic/glue than wood fiber. Just like electronics are being designed with obsolescence as a requirement, maybe more so is the furniture in your house...
Its so much more rewarding to build a giant custom table and be able to grunt, "hey look what i did". OR even pick up some older pieces at an estate sale and upcycle with a new varnish or paint and some modifications.
Table tops will warp if you just screw the boards together and to the base. You can avoid this by gluing the panels then attaching to base with proper fasteners to allow for expansion/contraction.
You can build them properly but this requires using true edge s4s lumber or removing the dimensional round edge with a table saw, band saw or jointer. Your glue up then requires a good number of large clamps. Even out of poplar, adler or basswood which are cheaper hardwoods you'll have $250-$300 in the table. Oak would be $500+.
>there's so much chip-board and laminating that I think there must be more plastic/glue than wood fiber. Just like electronics are being designed with obsolescence as a requirement, maybe more so is the furniture in your house
The problem is people want things cheap and nice looking. You can get a solid white oak table from Crate and Barrel for $1500; which isn't really that bad considering that's around $750 in ready to go s4s lumber from a mail order supplier. It's a lot cheaper to do as Ikea did and have a particle core with a 1/8" oak 'veneer'. Ikea's table is $600.
I would like to get some time back this winter and make some inside pieces.. I agree with the pocket screws, but I think I can get around some of that with a joiner. I feel like a joiner and planer are the next tools I will invest in.
>>people want things cheap and nice looking
I agree 1000% but, after the aforementioned fire, I personally have a new perspective. "Collecting" things is way below being able to say I invested in myself/family and built something.
You can go a long way with a decent hand-saw and a $30 Black & Decker cordless drill. People are weirdly impressed when you can knock together a book case or a picnic table. And probably the most fun project I've worked on in the last year was slamming together a tool shed over Labor Day weekend.
The flip side of that is that the sawmills will take absolutely garbage logs in and saw them out these days. My father has taken up logging again pretty much full-time since he retired (he loves cutting trees, but you can't do it as anything but a hobby unless you're fully mechanized these days), and he's just astounded at what they'll grade logs out as. Stuff he used to have trouble getting accepted as pulpwood they're taking as saw logs and sometimes even veneer.
i think the appeal of Ikea as stock is that its already cut down and comes with fasteners/brackets/etc. but you can come out ahead and have considerably more design flexibility if you know how to shop.
i built maybe 60' in shelving for my bedroom. light steel frame, inset reclaimed pine flooring. the whole thing was probably $50 in materials. and when i leave it on the street when i move out, someone is likely going to want to take it its not going to look like an old cardboard box.
Not quite like building your own wood furniture but I would be more keen to buy this then a $1k+ sofa that is impossible to move and will not last that long.
Edit: https://www.campaignliving.com/products/the-sofa?variant=389...