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.
Yea. It’s really bad looking for something online. They may be under the “solid wood” category for material, but they still are 90% particle board.
I prefer spending extra knowing that I’ll have something for decades and not have to replace it in a year or two. Fortunately for me, about 80% of my homes furniture is from Habitat for Humanity. They are fantastic for having a good selection of quality stuff for cheap. Some might need a little repair, but they tend to only accept decent stuff in the first place.
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.
Ikea has a lot of chip board furniture but they also have some decent solid wood furniture for a good price.
It’s usually pine but still for the price it’s a decent quality furniture that could last for a good time in good condition.
I would agree that using solid wood is a step up from veneered particle board in terms of longevity and durability. But they still use the same joinery system, those pin-and-latch things plus unglued dowels as alignment pins. These do offer the ability to disassemble the furniture in the future but every time you lean on, bump into, or otherwise apply a racking load to the piece, all that force is going to get transferred to the tiny amount of wood fiber surrounding those screw threads holding those latch pins in place, and eventually they’ll start to loosen. They’re still not as solid as a good old fashioned glued mortise and tenon, dado or dovetail joint.
I just moved into a house a couple years ago. While I’m mostly getting used furniture, I’m slowly looking into making my own and learning to repair what’s out there.
I’m really bad at staining or painting. I never feel like what I do comes out even.
Stain can be really difficult, and the real shit of it is cheap woods like pine, poplar and birch that you’d likely want to stain are the worst at it, they tend to come out blotchy. My recommendation is maybe add some tint to the top coat to steer the color in a direction you want but generally pick a wood that is the color you want already.
Same with old appliances.
And old cars…
And old people
This is true. I’m getting close to 50 and I’m already a good 37% dust.
And old toys
Even sex toys?
I have a prehistoric dildo, it still works perfectly.
What do you mean, “just a rock”?
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.
What’s a will?
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.
Removed by mod
I wonder why simple shoes (like a piece of wood and some cord) picked up in the East but not in the West.
They were picked up in the West as well, but not as well known probably because they weren’t viewed as fashionable. They’re called Pattens FYI
Patten (shoe) - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patten_(shoe)
Dutch are known for their wooden clogs, no?
Yes, but both that and the style linked in the other comment are more complex than the Japanese style sandals. They are just boards with some holes drilled and knotted cord put through the holes. Some have two other pieces of wood underneath them to raise them off the ground a bit (maybe they work better in mud?).
They look like something you could take an afternoon and make enough new ones for your whole family, if you’ve got some wooden planks and cord.
Clogs look like they’d each take a while to carve and would require more skill to craft.
Though I don’t know how common either of those were among the poorest of each region.
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 very thoughtful.
That’s an amazing gift
“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.
Then you have until eventually to acquire a giant hand carved wardrobe to leave them.
I have some work to do…
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.
Woodworker here, I’ve already built some things that will last longer than I will. Not so sure about “fancy ass” but they’re not particle board.
I’ve always thought woodworking would be a fun hobby. I expect to get into it one day.
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.
Lol that gives it a similar energy to people who get Japanese tattoos without knowing what the kanji even mean, only to later find out that what they thought said “powerful warrior” actually means “one udon meal set, please”.
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 don’t go to Starbucks very often, usually only in a pinch… but if you say “I want a large coffee,” they know what you mean. At most, they’ll say something like “do you mean grande or venti?” and I say, “the bigger one” or whatever.
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.
That totally leads to Narnia
Where does the IKEA one lead?
The Wall-E world
A Target in Modesto
Nørniä obviously
Now I finally understand the naming conventions at Ikea
It has its advantages. No lingonberry juice in Narnia.
The self checkout line in a Walmart after an especially hot summer day.
Will there be mythical creatures there too?
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
I’m more interested in avoiding plastic as much as I can. Having plastic infused pressed sawdust wrapped in plastic veneer is very unappealing to me.
Ya this is true. Ikea desks/tabletops are pretty garbo.
Ikea does have some nice solid wood furniture, but it’s not cheap. If you’re not okay with spending 5 times as much, you’re getting MDF garbage.
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.
It’s frustrating trying to find a good mid-range furniture store. It seems like you’re either buying stuff dirt cheap or spending a fortune, with little in between.
Woodworker here. Do I detect an under-served market segment?
I personally dislike 4 inch thick slab river tables as much as I dislike particle board bookshelves that bow under their own weight, and I’m perfectly happy to build $200 shaker end tables out of pine.
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.
Just checking, what product do you “stain” your table with?
Pepsi
That does explain lasting only 3 years.
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.
Yeah, but i got my bedroom from them.
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!
