The Pleasure of Designing your own Furniture | Hacker News Reader

The Pleasure of Designing your own Furniture

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For those who haven't yet read The Existental Pleasures of Engineering by Florman, I highly recommend it; it's short, concise, and talks about how engineering/hacking/building can bring satisfaction to those who practice it.

http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Pleasures-Engineering-Thom... (non-affiliate)

I'm happy he could have it made for $1,150 - in Mexico. If you talk to carpenters in the US, you'll find that making furniture is a tiny bit more expensive. A single couch can easily be $5K.

I've considered it, done the investigation, and decided I don't want to spend that kind of money. Turns out that "Scandinavian Furniture" is doing quite well :)

My gf is doing it now using a carpenter found on Etsy. It will be cheaper than comparable furniture from West Elm or Restoration Hardware. But this is for tables, not for a couch. Unfortunately, she started on the project before I could teach her SketchUp. She and the carpenter email sloppy drawings back and forth. We have no idea what we'll receive this month.

Has she blogged about her experience anywhere? Would love to hear more.

I have been doing experiments by getting stuff from shelves to frames built by etsy folks. It has been working out somewhat well. I do have to add a few modifications on my end. Haven't scaled up to a couch yet.

She found a local carpenter, or somebody will ship cross-country?

Depending on the type of wood, 1k might barely cover materials. Walnut for instance might be pretty close to $1k for a table. I recently built a dining room table out of Red Oak, and it was close to 300. Red Oak being one of the cheaper hardwoods available in New England.

[because i'm shameless.. here's my table http://i.imgur.com/6RBAEkc.jpg]

That table is fantastic.

Agreed, nicely detailed!

I am an amateur woodworker and you are 100% correct on the price of wood. It's based largely on geography as well. I cannot tell what type of wood was used for the build but the frame of that table appears to be pine which is pretty cheap in most areas (and a decent wood too!).

I like a nice through mortise.

>> If you talk to carpenters in the US, you'll find that making furniture is a tiny bit more expensive.

Na, you just need to figure out who to go to. My buddy lives in SE Pennsylvania, and he had as some seriously nice furniture made by some of the local Amish. Total cost for his bedroom and kitchen furniture combined-> $1200

I think that's a fairly large exception. We don't all have friendly Amish around :)

It's a bigger exception than you think. The Amish are as good as anyone at figuring out how much their work is worth. It's not usually such a steal.

That's quite surprising - Amish furniture tends to go for a massive premium!

A note on nomenclature in the US: A $2,000 [or $5K] couch is "woodworking" or [furniture making] not "carpentry." The perceived value is based on a hugely different frame of reference. A carpenter can come to your house with a helper and a pickup truck full of tools and charge you $15,000 to remodel your bathroom with materials bought exclusively from home depot. sad.

I've taken it one step further and actually learned basic furniture carpentry. I'm primarily a UI designer by trade but I found the skills easily transferable. In an odd way it's no harder than the basic layout CSS I write every day.

The big different of course is that when I mess up with wood I can't just erase everything and redo it. Woodworking has taught me to slow down.

> I'm primarily a UI designer by trade but I found the skills easily transferable.

Would you mind highlighting a few of those?

Paging Dr. Norman:

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

Sure. Most of woodworking is measurement of rectangles. That's pretty much my entire day in CSS. Instead of pixel pushing I push inches. Woodworking even has it's own box model. When I make a cut on a table saw I need to account for Kerf, which is the part of the wood being stripped away. It's like a border 1px on my box :)

The rest is just basic design. If you know how to arrange a web layout, you'll find designing furniture much more fun.

Probably the reason I like it most is the permanence. Although sites I've designed for the web have lasted decades at this point, none of them keep the actual design for a year or two. When I build something in wood it's going to be like that forever. The only thing I can do is repaint it.

Last year, my 8-year-old kids and their classmates designed and hand-built (eventually with dowels instead of screws) their own chairs at their amazing SF school. See http://www.sfbrightworks.org/2013/11/hawk-chairs/

Here's a quote about the lack of undo: "The consequences of careless work were immediate and unavoidable, and the amount of focus, resilience and perseverance required by these chairs was immense."

Couldn't agree more. I'm a developer by trade, the skills of breaking down a problem into manageable chunks and coming up with a gameplan to get it done are directly transferrable over to woodworking. Woodworking is all about problem solving, coming up with a plan, and then very carefully executing that plan.

I also really enjoy the fact that you're making something with your hands. With economies as advanced as they are today, many of us have lost touch with what it's like to create something with your hands, that you can touch and use. It's hard to explain, but it's extremely satisfying.

My girlfriend designed almost all the furniture in our house (she's not a professional designer), and I think it's far better than if we bought something ready (we live in odd-shaped small house).

The cost were approximately the same as buying form IKEA. It was now, I would try to build build some of the furniture myself. A couple of years ago we got a local woodworker do it. Decent price, furniture built especially for our home, my girl happy to see her own ideas live, the local woodworker making some money - it was win for everyone.

hmm. I wonder if you check back with this woodworker to see if s/he is still in business and can match the prices. in my experience, you can't even buy the raw materials for the same cost that Ikea can put out a finished product. [though ikea's prices are getting higher and the material quality is getting worse on the majority of their wood products.]

It's a luxury that few working in the US can afford in the US. He paid $1100 for all that furniture. Getting that done custom by a craftsman (craftsperson?) here in the US would probably cost a multiple of at least 2x and perhaps 5x.

The bed/couch is interesting, in that the original inspiration was the mid-century classic George Nelson Case Study collection (Modernica makes the canonical version - it's an awesome modular collection of tables and couches and beds and things) that Urban Outfitters created their version of, then the author worked based off of that, largely reinventing the original.

The Nelson sofas seem to have seats that recline slightly, which would make putting them together into a bed unworkable.

But the Nelson daybeds (http://modernica.net/day-beds/view-day-bed-series/) are very close to what he did. Good eye to notice this!

It's worth saying that modernist furniture of this type can be relatively easy to copy and riff off of. The Eames furniture and accessories are another touchstone of the style.

Aye - the daybeds (and the beds) were what I was referring to.

So much of that mid-century design was focused on designing things that could be constructed affordably - this largely came from the same post-WWII era of suburbanization where building houses affordably was solved, and a whole lot of middle-income folks needed to furnish their new houses. Roll this forward a few decades and we have Ikea's flat-pack furniture, and what was effectively the 1950s Ikea became "trendy" and "designer" and got priced up.

Yes, another example of the middle moving up is Gregory Ain (http://marvistatract.org) or Eichler tract homes. Originally made inexpensive for a mass market, and now really prized as a relatively high-end pedigreed home.

I'm not aware of a parallel to Ikea in home building today. Maybe some of the urban infill you see.

To be honest, I think most, if not all design was done by the carpenter here. Without any dimensions or details or notes or specifications, this is more like: "The pleasure of commissioning someone to design furniture based on your own sketches."

It's akin to someone saying, "I made an iPhone app! I drew a bunch of pencil sketches for a wireframe, and gave it to someone who then built it for me! Everyone should make their own iPhone apps."

Never mind, of course, that the 'someone' had to interpret the sketches, create mockups, create design assets, develop and test the iPhone app.

If he gave dimensioned drawings with a standard 4-view layout, with some pencil sketches, specified the materials, and/or created the design through an iterative process with the carpenter, then sure, I'll call that design. But design, this isn't.

HN would understand that most of the importance is in the execution of the idea. This is a furniture analog to "I have a great idea for an app/website - I just need someone to build it!"

CustomMade (http://www.custommade.com) is a great place to emulate this process, i.e find a craftsman/maker who can help you ideate and create great pieces of furniture, jewelry, and other crafted goods. Check us out if you're interested in buying custom and aren't sure where to start!

Also for any hubot fans out there, we commissioned one of our makers to create a statue of him for GitHub. http://www.custommade.com/model-of-hubot/by/impressiveprotot...

An interesting point on the design your own furniture vs buy prebuilt spectrum is to treat Ikea furniture as base components that you then customize to your exact needs.

Definitely not as nice as what the OP had commissioned, but likely less expensive and easier.

Tons of examples: http://www.ikeahackers.net/

Some Ikea furniture is modular from the get-go. I have a Galant desk setup that I'm incredibly happy with: I mixed-and-matched frame and tabletop parts to get an L-shaped desk that fits my space and needs perfectly, and combined a small half-round tabletop extension, three short furniture legs, and a package of felt pads to make a monitor/speaker stand that I can reposition and store stuff under.

While it may be too expensive to have it made entirely by a craftsman the US, if you're up to the challenge you can join a woodworking shop and learn how to build it. It will certainly take more time but you will get a more complete experience than simply designing it.

There is a distinct tactile and visceral pleasure in designing and building your own furniture that goes beyond the pleasure I receive design and building complex software projects. The permanence, the necessity of planning, the measuring, the careful diligence required at each step.

Most of the furniture in the condo I inhabit with my wife is either designed by us and built by me, or designed by us and built by a local craftsman. We have been very happy with everything we've acquired so far. There are a few "stock pieces" that came from various furniture stores, those themselves either being one offs or antiques, but for most part, it is all custom.

The prices however? Oh how those prices cause us pain. The raw material costs alone are eye-opening. Having a craftsman build furniture for us after we have designed it, causes frequent sticker shock. I just know if I walk in and want something, we are talking North of $2,000 as just the opening price. We have been on a bit of a spree this year buying five new pieces in the first half of the year whereas normally we buy one piece per year.

The one thing I know about the furniture that is our home is that it will last probably longer than our lifetimes and other families will hopefully derive pleasure and utility from the items long after my wife and I are both gone.

I've just started getting into making my own furniture last year. I've found it is a really code release from coding/designing/staring at devices all day long. Building a website or app is very rewarding, but there is a different feeling when you build something with your hands that you actually use. It's nice to have an actually hobby.

I've made 2 tables and a desk. It started out of necessity: I have a really weird obtuse-angled wall that no desk would fit inside. Wrote a post about it if anyone wants to see. http://bit.ly/1k6XiU7

Haven't moved onto chairs/couches etc because the whole upholstery thing kind of scares me. Also - you can easily build most furniture for a few hundred dollars, but you have to look for it! I have a construction dumpster near my house right now with a ton of old pallets they are throwing out, that right there is enough to make some really cool stuff. Also re-purposing is really "in" right now so in my opinion even better :)

While I haven't designed my own furniture I insist that it should be real honest wood (now). Which means I can just give it a polish if the kids scratch it. Or sand it if necessary.

Also a lot of the furniture is bought from someone around here who had found something they liked even better.

One path for would-be furniture makers to take is to send computer files to a computer-controlled router, which are becoming more available via local makerspaces or sites like 100kgarages.com. (If you happen to have access to a high-powered laser cutter you can make do with that too: http://guavaduck.com/laser/#bed) Starting points for designs are available from sources like http://atfab.co, and 3D CAD software is helpful, but not necessary.

Those chairs are particularly nice. Really nice design, and nice to see the inspirations too. It's a shame that in many countries (UK and US) carpentry has become a rarified trade only available to the rich - perhaps with increasing automation we'll learn to appreciate jobs like this again, making something wonderful and unique by hand.

For what it's worth Buildasofa.com in the US seems to be making custom more affordable. I can't speak to the quality as I haven't ordered anything, but several friends speak highly of them and I believe their prices are far below the $5k number being thrown around.

Based on their website it sounds like they just modify their existing designs.

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