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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

Did he leave instructions on assembling his funeral?

<3 <3 Ikea is life

> <3 <3 Ikea is life

Fortunately it really isn't. It is ok, mostly single use stuff that seems to be cheap but that is actually quite expensive if you take into account the material costs and the production quality. Even so, their sticker price and economies of scale put almost everybody competing with them out of business.

It’s ok looking furniture at decent prices if you’re just a little bit careful when picking stuff from them. They’re the perfect company for very mobile clients, such as myself, as I’ve been moving houses at an average at one every 2-3 years for the past 15 years, it would have been even more economically bad for me had I invested in furniture meant to last 30 to 50 years (compared to Ikea’s 5-to-10 years) but for which I would have had to pay at least 2 or 3 times more.

Before disposable stuff, people bought used furniture and then re-sold it when they moved. It was less convenient, but certainly not 2-3 times more expensive, since good furniture holds its value.

Most of the times when you rent you don't have the actual time to sell the furniture that you bought, because the "finding a new place and moving right in"-period is pretty short. Plus, you kind of need your bed, your chairs and your table until the day when you're actually moving out, so if you were the one who had actually bought them and there's not enough space for them in the new place then your only solution is to leave them behind.

Other options that might be available:

- Selling to the next renter or to the landlord

- Finding a buyer (individual or store) and arranging with them to pick it up on the day you're moving out

- Selling your stuff a few days before leaving and improvising temporary alternatives (e.g. $20 air mattress on the floor, or staying with friends)

Note: I'm not saying these are better than just writing off your current furniture and buying new stuff. All I'm saying is that other options existed before IKEA, and continue to exist today.

Could you point out specifically where they are cutting corners? Their materials are cheap, but not particularly short-lived. The woodwork quality is second to none: never experienced jams, excess play or position mismatches on IKEA pieces.

The edge connectors are particularly troublesome and those are present in almost all their furniture making it next to impossible to disassemble a piece of furniture to move it to a new house. They are designed to be single use.

I see.

Perhaps it's a bigger problem if you try to move out of historic house with winding narrow stairs. Just moved houses here without disassembling anything but the largest pieces like sofa sets. All my furniture including IKEA pieces made it just fine.

I've disassembled and moved Ikea furniture multiple times. You have to be a bit careful, but it's certainly not impossible.

Same here. I did not have to throw out furniture from Ikea yet, after having moved two times.

Well, lucky you. I've had those 'cam lock nuts' break loose on first assembly (so not even when disassembling to move them), and I'm plenty careful and have lots of experience when it comes to mechanics. The basic problem is this: You are supposed to put a very short screw into a bunch of glued together particle board fibers at a ninety degree angle, and then the cam lock will pull on that link to create the desired connection. So you're pulling with considerable force on a 5 mm screw thread into particle board. That's entirely the wrong way to connect particle board, it is borderline strong enough for that first assembly but if you ever take that piece of furniture apart the fibers will be pretty much destroyed the second time you drive the screw in, and anybody who has tried to move the pieces with those screws sticking out more than likely ended up repairing things in creative ways because they will break off when you look at them cross eyed so forget about moving them around.

Altogether this is one of the worst things about Ikea furniture, that and the over reliance on honeycomb cardboard filled surfaces making solid looking sidewalls anything but.

> next to impossible to disassemble a piece of furniture to move it to a new house. They are designed to be single use.

As is most furniture?

I really don't know what kind of IKEA stuff people buy that breaks all the time ?

Living in Sweden I've bought quite the number of IKEA furniture, and to this day none has failed. What has been thrown out ( or sold ) has been stuff I got bored with, didn't fit a new apartment, or similar.

There has been missing bolts, goods damaged during transportation etc, some of them really annoying, but all furniture has held together longer than I wanted to keep them.

What is this mythical furniture source that’s better quality than ikea but affordable? A couple of years ago I bought a house after living in furnished rentals for about 10 years, so had to buy furniture. The options seemed to be:

(a) ikea

(b) stuff generally of lower quality than ikea and in my subjective opinion far worse design, for somewhat more money.

Literally all the furniture in my house is ikea, as a result.

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