Legs and knobs for IKEA and other furniture | Hacker News Reader

Legs and knobs for IKEA and other furniture

prettypegs.com

158 pointsgitgud53 comments

We've use them, a great way to "elevate" your IKEA furniture.

Another good one doing IKEA compatible furniture parts is Superfront: https://superfront.com/. We use them for a bathroom cabinet in our last house.

Also take a look at Plykea for inspiration on what you can do with IKEA kitchen carcasses with custom fronts/sides/fillers: https://www.plykea.com/

During Covid my wife and I took six weeks off to refit our kitchen ourselves. IKEA carcasses, a lot of Baltic Birch plywood - all cut and finished ourselves - and half the fronts from uk company https://www.nakedkitchens.com/. It was a lot of fun, no one has a kitchen like ours, and all in it was under £6k for something that would have probably been closer to £40k if we had gone to a local bespoke kitchen company.

From the Plykea website: "we prefer to celebrate the beauty of the plywood edges"

Am I missing something? Did they seal them with epoxy? Because plywood edges are notorious for taking in water and turning it into a swelling, rotting, falling-apart mess. If I'm making a counter top or low kitchen cabinet, I'm using solid wood or an alternative (preferably of whatever's at the local reclaimed building materials store)

For those into DIY, if you're going to remodel an entire kitchen, it's not hard to make your own wood faces of any size. You do need to buy a few tools, but they're tools you can keep using for decades. A circular saw, some pipe clamps and pipes, wood glue, a saw track, sandpaper + sanding block, and lots of 2x4s, are enough to make anything from dining tables to doors to kitchen counter tops to cabinet doors.

See Kerf for a cabinet maker that uses a lot of europly/appleply with exposed edges: https://www.instagram.com/kerfdesign

Japanese DIY speaker-builders love the exposed ply-edge thing.

Maybe a sign of the times we live in when a multi-ply plywood means quality (as opposed to particle board, low-ply construction plywood ... OSB?)

We went exposed edges, and finished with Osmo (https://osmouk.com/) works really well. It's not like it's being rained on like outside, if your cabinets are getting wet enough for that to happen the chipboard carcasses with blow out first.

Baltic birch also tends to use an exterior grade adhesive for gluing the layers together.

100% agree on the tools, I brought a track saw for the project. First time using one, they are brilliant, and no need to get an expensive Festool. I got this one (https://www.screwfix.com/p/erbauer-erb690csw-185mm-electric-...) and it's perfect for the job.

I can see the tracksaw being useful for breaking 4x8 plywood panels down to door size, but did you end up using a table saw for shorter cuts?

Maybe it's because I work on so many slapped-together projects, but I barely use my table saw anymore. Instead I use my cordless circular and a reference, usually my speed square. If I don't need too much precision I just hold the short piece and square in one hand, lean it against the corner of my deck, and cut. Other times i'll grab some squeeze clamps and scrap wood, make a quick fence/jig on a table, and cut against that. It's just so much faster than setting up the table saw outside (I don't have a woodworking bench). If I have to make a bunch of cuts in succession I might use the table saw, or again I might use the circular. I've been too lazy to build a crosscut sled; if I had one I'd use the table more often.

If you're ripping down 4x8's, I've noticed that using a piece of foam insulation on the concrete is the perfect size

Osmo oil is the best. Highly recommend it as well.

Took me a while to work out Osmo, but I finally understand how to get an amazing finish with it every time (using a spatula of all things!).

Osmo and Rubio Monocoat have really made finishing wood easy for amateurs (as well as professionals).

I haven't looked at the Plykea stuff in detail but clear seals on everything seems to be the standard these days even for "natural" looking finishes.

For large enough cabinet doors where you want a flat, flush, uniform look, plywood gives you dimensional stability which is a big deal. Also seems to be common. I'd band the edges in most cases though vs painting or such.

Especially if you're DIYing, cause depending on just what level of fit and finish you want, you're gonna have a hard time getting things perfectly square, perfectly flush with most wood you'll be able to buy, without getting into jointers and planers and other fun stuff.

It's easy to do "pretty good" and very very hard to do "very good" without either a significant investment in tools or time or both.

Plywood edges, nicely finished, with a clear seal, can be beautiful in some contexts.

That said, they're ugly, noisy, and distracting in *most* contexts I've seen them used. It takes a good designer to make them beautiful.

Would love to see a photo of the final outcome!

Seconded!

Here in Europe there are dozens, probably more, of companies selling IKEA fronts and handles.

Buy, as always, the major expensive is labour, not materials.

About to do my kitchen too

Seen of lot of these, might be a good idea for IKEA to start launching limited exclusives with designers so clients can also get it from them.

Looks like Superfront doesn't ship many of their products to the US. Bummer.

Know of anyone who provides custom rails for IKEA drawers? Eventually they fail and ball bearing start to fall out and they do not sell replacements.

I like the idea of IKEA furniture being frames for further customization. Since their furniture is so ubiquitous, it's like a common touch point for modders and DIY'ers.

I've used Bemz[0] custom upholstery for their couches before. A nice way to mix it up and refresh your living room without replacing the entire thing. Can recommend.

[0] https://bemz.com/

Do you not find the couches’ structures get loose before the fabric falls apart? That’s been my experience at least.

Any other resources like these to recommend? I’m newly into woodworking and can now make a mean tabletop, but my joinery is much more rudimentary. Would be nice to be able to make nice looking gifts for people earlier in the learning process.

Is it just me, or is it really hard to focus on anything on this website? I can't pick out a specific reason for it, but looking at it feels chaotic, like my eyes are being drawn to a dozen things at once

Maybe it's one of those ChatGPT designed and operated businesses everyone's been dreaming about recently? ;)

There is a design issue with the titles. They are placed on top of images, but with no background and without selecting the images in a way that they cant clash. On some parts of the images it is then white on white or black on black.

Not sure it's only that, but it won't help.

You can also attempt to do this within IKEA. You can sometimes buy bed/sofa/... legs separately and use ones from other series and furniture.

Sometimes they are quite different, or at least fit your style better than the default ones.

They sell various knobs and handles too, at least in Europe, next to the returns/damaged sales section.

Seems fine, but how is this different than what any hardware store sells? Is there some unique size of screw or something with Ikea furniture?

In the US you are unlikely to get metric threaded legs at a local hardware store.

But yeah, knobs are knobs. From time to time I help assemble scores of tiny Ikea dressers for a charity. About 1 in 6 ends up needing rework because something is either machined poorly or breaks during assembly. The most common failure is split knobs, so I bring a sack of fun hand painted knobs off of Amazon and give the top drawers "accent knobs" on enough units to complete the assembly run. I'm told the accent drawer units are very popular with the end recipients.

Most of my Ikea stuff I end up customizing in some way. Got a giant toy box drawer - cut a big hole in it and it's a perfect litter box enclosure. Hung a Kallax on the wall, and used my own brackets to line up with the studs. Have Besta cabinets in my kitchen and living room, and used my own hardware.

This is just an e-commerce site for furniture parts.

This is not HN material -- it's just an ad, essentially. It should be flagged.

Relax, it's the weekend, and it's an interesting hack.

Just a couple of weeks ago I tacked on optional legs under a cabinet (all IKEA material, hadn't used them initially), and I like to see there are alternatives.

I actually took it not as an ad but as a case study in a creative business idea.

I guess I enjoyed this ad and felt a little inspired.

Super interesting to me. I think a lot of developers like the Ikea aesthetic.

Definitely far more interesting than the deluge of crypto and AI articles.

My wife bought a set of painted knobs to replace the default ones on the dresser that we got for the kids’ room. It was an inexpensive way to make the dresser just a little more unique.

There is no worse quality furniture than IKEA. There is no real wood, just sawdust and glue. It just "looks" nice. But even those looks don't compare with the shine of real wood.

Most ikea stuff has a very good price quality ratio so that's not true. It also isn't true that they don't use real wood, it depends on what you buy.

Are you talking about current pricing? They’ve jacked up a lot of items 20-30% the past couple of years on top of reducing quality

That's a fair point and a trend I have definitely noticed as well. The price quality ratio isn't what it used. The founder died 5 years ago, I wonder if it's related. He was a notorious penny pincher.

It also depends on the region. Here in HK, Ikea is very expensive (about double the price I used to see in France), to the point where it's cheaper to get a wardrobe custom made in good quality plywood exactly according to our dimensions than to buy a wardrobe that's close to the dimensions we need in Ikea.

In Japan it was the only place I found with good reasonably priced furniture, especially for larger sofas and beds. Nitori was good quality but a bit more expensive and everything was low and small. Besides that, there seemed to be absolute junk for low prices and high end handmade stuff for very high prices. I simply wasn’t anywhere else with stuff in the midrange.

Now I love close to France and Ikea is definitely the best value for midrange. Some of the German chains are pretty good too (but still 30% more comparing similar quality).

Yup, lived in Japan before moving here and definitely matches my experience :) The one other store besides Nitori and Ikea was Muji. I bought a few furniture from them which was decent. Definitely more adapted to the Japanese market in term of dimensions.

That’s so cool. Plywood furniture in the UK is uber premium as plywood is super expensive here.

Lots of its wood was sourced from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. There’s some stuff like bed slats in certain sizes that have been out of stock for months at a time.

Barely 5% of their furniture is real wood though? It’s mostly sawdust and glue and veneer.

IMO a lot of their “out of stock” is fake scarcity.

I don't know about the percentage, but in my searches, their particle board stuff was the same price and much higher quality than other stores, and their solid wood stuff was cheaper than other stores.

I agree, and at the low and medium price points in Ikea, the quality is much better than a similar priced item from Amazon or Wal-Mart. And if you want solid wood, it will be hard to beat Ikea there as well.

I’ve moved twice internationally in the last several years and I tried to get kind of medium quality stuff and the only thing that could compete on price quality ratio with Ikea was used higher end furniture. But it requires a lot of effort and patience to collect.

It's sawdust and glue if you buy the absolute cheapest IKEA stuff. And even that is pretty good quality considering the price. IKEA does sell furniture made out of real wood too, it naturally is just more expensive.

It really depends what you use it for. Engineered wood like MDF in general is better for cabinetry than wood.

You'll have to explain that to me. My experience with MDF has been that it is a mold-magnet if used anywhere near where it might be exposed to water (bathrooms and kitchens are out). It requires special fasteners as it doesn't hold screws (or even glue) well. It's ugly, heavy, is hard on cutting tools (and the dust in leaves in my shop tends to jam up tool joints that are supposed to slide/rotate like on a miter saw).

I pay more and go with a multi-ply plywood in any place that others might fall back to MDF.

Many end up painting over the "shine of real wood"

Also in some applications, you don't want real wood - it scratches too easily, to the point where a cheap laminate piece would look better (I have a very nice wood dining table I bought in July, but my cats won't stay off of it)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com