An architect friend of mine once said that he admired IKEA above all other furniture manufacturers because it made a modern range of aesthetics available to the masses. IKEA had done more to evolve the public taste than any other manufacturer.
And I do have to agree. I can remember what ghastly furniture most shops used to have around here. There was a lot of what we call "cabin furniture" - which isn't made to look good, just be practical. (Well, some people like that look, but it is a bit...dull). Sure, there was more solid wood furniture, but guess what: that durability comes at a cost. Not only in terms of money, but also in terms of how easy it was to install and move.
And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
As for quality: I have owned some pricey designer furniture and I can't say that I'm always impressed with the quality. Yes, if you have a lot more money you can get really well built furniture. But IKEA is more often than not more than sufficient quality. (Also see their "hidden tags" campaign)
If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price. (Collectible furniture is a whole different deal where you don't actually care all that much about quality, but more about it being an original piece).
For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means. And I'm not trying to make some clever rhetorical point here. I can't really think of any company that offers what they offer and comparable quality, looks and price here in Europe.
> If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price.
That's not the point. A large chunk of the price is the name on it and the marketing/image you associate yourself with. I thin, as engineers, that's hard to relate to. But that is how it works.
The price is not a reflection of quality, it's an outcome of a process to pick a price just enough people are willing to pay.
There is also some life stage appropriate utility in its ~disposable entry tier pricing.
For example, having young kids is not a good time to have a nice teak dining room table. (Or new wood floors for that matter) (or really anything nice you don’t want to hide in a locked box or room)
Also, pets, like a cat is wonderful. But without great diligence a more lower mid-tier couch will get clawed up the same as an ikea special. At least it may be more comfortable in the meantime.
I suspect wealth may be having your cake and eating it too—-you have fancy furniture that kids or pets wreck and you file that under dc.
All of it screams for automated materials reprocessing. One can only hope that the collision of robotics and AI will reduce the amount of landfill we create.
> For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means.
I look in antique/thrift/charity/freecycle/secondhand stores or groups. Where I live you can pick up a solid hardwood dresser for a few hundred bucks, because as you say - nobody wants their parents’ heirlooms. And lots of things can be had for free if you can hire a van to collect.
Also "estate sales/auctions" and/or online returns auctions.
A month ago I got an entire king-size bed headboard (with storage), with cabinets on each side, and a bridge that connects the two cabinets across the top (and has lighting - also there is power in the headboard - needs a few upgrades though).
It was made in 1986 - solid wood.
I paid $1 CAD at an estate sale...
Now, the matching dresser with a tri-fold mirror was $175.
Why the difference? No one wanted the hassle of disassembly for the bed unit - but many felt they could probably flip the dresser.
Admittedly, I had to rent a U-Haul (say about $100 including gas) and rope in a family member to help with the move. (because, it had to be at least 800lbs of awkward parts...)
So, my all in was $276 plus some auction fees.
But - still cheaper, more durable and better looking than most "DIY assembly options".
OTOH - if we move again, this sucker stays with the house...
At least here, you'll also find a lot of IKEA furniture at those stores as well. Most of the nicer stuff tends to go to higher end stores and ends up being rather pricy.
Yes, the tried-and-true first apartment cheap stuff is still there. But the majority of what's for sale in IKEA these days is of significantly better quality (and significantly higher price).
The best alternative to IKEA furniture is more expensive IKEA furniture.
You can easily get better kitchen for example here in Europe, but you have to pay >2x more. Their price/value ratio is stellar usually (but not always). Some designs are great, some are... obscure and I would not want it at home even for free. Taste is eye of the beholder and all that.
One problem is - its sort of take it or leave it. You can't really make custom sized kitchen, you only compose of lego-like bricks and try to cover the inevitable gaps, but they are there. Fine if you don't have constraints, but we do - square-like shape with hard dimensions on all 4 sides. Sloped roof on one side. A lot of custom work and its not perfect, cannot be, its Ikea.
But we got big kitchen for... 11-12k altogether, including artificial stone worktop. Only due to the fact that their sub-contracting company (here in Switzerland!!) messed up first delivery, and white worktop with small black veins came as black with white veins (order came good to factory but out came reverse). Second delivery - each plate was mildly different coloring, so when put together, it looked very cheap and amateurish. Raised with Ikea, after some discussion they offered another one but couldn't guarantee color uniformity. I've chosen another look that would work in any case, but then they seemingly decided cut off that supplier and just returned all the money for worktop, while we kept our current one. Around 5k that was.
Also my massive pet peeve with their kitchen - you have to take their always crappy dishwashers, buying directly say Bosch products won't make them fit well with closing mechanism. I had to throw away perfectly functional Siemens dishwasher and buy their Bosch one. Sounds good, but never ever do Ikea rebrands work the same, offer same quality as originals. That new top of the line (in Ikea) Bosch is massively subpar to older basic Siemens one.
I love IKEA because I could furnish entire office (apart from chairs, they don't have anything of Herman Miller quality) with practical and good looking desks and other fixtures and I didn't spend a fortune. I don't know what it would look like if I had to use other suppliers. Not many showroom if at all, long lead times, often problematic assembly.
> And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
This highly depends on the furniture. As an example, my dad built some custom pieces out of solid oak that are absolutely finding a place in my house after he's gone.
Your father did not buy those so that isn't a counterexample to what the GP said. Clearly, something your father made with his own hands will have a different value to something he bought.
IKEA furniture is great for small adjustments to fit your needs. Not costing a fortune also makes it easier to experiment with it.
Since they're so common, it's easy to find CAD drawings for most of them.
I did a small hack/conversion on a Billy closet to hide some pipes in our apartment.
https://vanderwalt.de/blog/customizing-ikea-billy-to-hide-pi...
My mind immediately went: I’m sure there is some German law or ordinance or regulation against hiding your Gaszähler. This surely goes against die Niederdruckanschlussverordnung.
Now that you have published this online, police will visit you to remove the Billy!
I really hope not! But it does look much better this way, it was an eyesore. And the regular heizung guys didnt complain when they saw it like this, so im assuming all is well
As long as you can easily slide it out of the way and it isn't fixed to the wall, it wouldn't be a problem for anyone who needs to service it. Therefore, it would not be against regulations, because all regulations in Germany are logical
Presumably because it's cheaper. Ours was also originally in home; the utility recently came through and replaced all of ours with exterior units, likely at great cost (horizontal drilling machines aren't cheap)
I suspect the tragedy in Pennsylvania [1] was the catalyst. There are lots of potential issues with keeping these things indoors.
Some time ago I realised that second-hand Ikea furniture is a cheap source of material for DIY projects. Facebook Marketplace (UK) has plenty of Pax cupboards which provide useful large boards. Prices vary, but you can pick up almost pristine items for almost nothing. If you don't need whole boards, spot damage is acceptable. Buying similar new materials would perhaps be better, but cost considerably more.
I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.
I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.
If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
IKEA furniture can hold up very well if you follow the instructions precisely and don't disassemble them (in most cases).
We have furniture from IKEA that we bought at least five years ago that still functions great. A mattress we got from them is absolutely stellar with a memory foam topper; all of our guests love it. I think our coffee table is ten years old now.
However, everything goes to hell once you try to take it apart. This is why our mattresses are not on IKEA bed frames. Taking them apart has ALWAYS weakened them significantly. (We use Thuma Japanese joinery bed frames, which are AMAZING for moving and very high quality).
Which is kind of moot when you're talking about high-quality furniture, as they are usually single pieces as well.
I've started wood-gluing together my IKEA and other flat-pack furniture to try and increase its usable life since - as you said - it's counterproductive to dis/re-assemble most of it anyways. I've not been at it long enough to claim effectiveness, but so far nothing has started to wobble.
For what is worth, I had an IKEA kitchen for 12+ years, we disassembled it and gave it to some people that could reuse it, and it's still fine. OTOH my IKEA couch fell apart in half that time, but my wife fixed it up and it lasted until we renovated. We gave that away too.
IKEA has a wide range of products, some fall apart quickly, some last longer.
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
I don't see this mentioned enough! Wood glue will improve the stability massively.
Obviously beds and huge bookshelves might need to come apart again, so use your best judgement. But chairs, dressers, end-tables, etc. are completely worth it.
This makes any assembly 1-way, though. Some people (with a very high time:money ratio obviously) might find the collapsible, portable nature of Ikea an advantage.
I'm sure I'm not the only person to have built a wall unit in a bedroom only to learn, later, getting it out the door, and through the hall, and down the stairs turns out to be job for Dirk Gently.
That said, moving some of this flat pack furniture has been a mixed bag. Some move well, some don't.
I did have a wall unit, a $99 hardware store particle board piece assembled with big screws and those interesting, round cam fasteners. It survived three separate moves, including one where it flew out the back of my pickup truck onto asphalt (thankfully in a gas station, vs the freeway I was about to get on). Corner got dinged, door flew off, but it survived!
But I've had other pieces that assemble and are rigid, when torqued around through the moving process start to come undone. The particle board and fasteners are designed for loads only in specific directions and tend to not do well, and fail, outside of those.
I've owned a lot of IKEA furniture, and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them. And I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a flatpack-to-furniture-to-flatpack design.
> and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them
That is wise. I don't claim disassembling it for move was a good idea, but it compressed my stuff into a compact car.
Consider also that some of their beds don't fit through a doorway built (esp if doorway is not code width) so some level of disassembly may be required for mere room-to-room moving.
I'm only calling out a tradeoff that may or may not apply. Not everyone is you and me.
> I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a
The whole point of this thread (this site?) is repurposing outside of creator intent.
No many real furniture out there with entire ecosystem of storage/containers sized for it. IKEA sheet/stamped metal stuff that introduced a few years ago will last forever.
I've got the Ikea PLATSA wardrobe and none of their organisers fit properly in the drawers. My wife instead got some of the MUJI organisers and those fit much better because they're made of cloth/canvas thus bendy/squishy.
I think my GALANT desk with a glass top survived multiple moves, including one that had it travel about 800 km in a trailer. Worked fine until the day I got a standing desk, at which point I put it up online and someone bought it from me. That desk might still be kicking around to this day.
I think really the only IKEA product that has given me issues is the MARKUS chair, and more specifically, the gas spring leaking. Apart from that, I think everything is more or less functional? Even the five-euro LACK coffee table is still fine, even if it has signs of use on it. I've also bought used IKEA shelves and they're still holding up fine.
> If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
IKEA is ideal for a certain stage of your life. It's ideal for optimizing vertical space. It's largely function over form. It looks like middle school classroom furniture. And when junior writes on it w/ a sharpie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
When you have the space for a separate dining room, agreed that used antiques are comparable in price.
I wouldn't touch their couches rich or poor though; they're painful.
It's very use and location dependent. I'm going to get a good or at least relatively good dining room table. Some cubbyholes/shelves for a closet? IKEA is fine. I also have an IKEA bureau in my bedroom. I occasionally wonder if I should have splurged on a "real" piece of furniture but it saved me thousands of dollars and is perfectly adequate.
I have an IKEA LANDSKRONA (in Gunnared dark grey) and it's a good sofa for like 650 €. I don't think I've really considered sofas to be that markedly better than mine even if they're double or quadruple the cost.
Whenever I looked at using IKEA stuff to hack or incorporate into a larger build, the cost, effort, and quality never seemed worth it to me.
I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.
If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.
I also did a butcher block top. Cut it down and routed to perfectly flow around what passes for a "straight wall" in this house, spent entirely too long sanding and finishing.
Then put it on some IKEA drawer blocks, because I want drawers, but I'm not equipped to build those in any reasonable timeframe.
Cutting down a desk top is something you can do with sawhorses and some good weather. More intricate things need an actual workshop for good results.
I did something similar, but just bought the wooden desk top from Ikea. Sanded/stained and added some standing desk legs. Perfect balance between customization and not building from scratch.
I'd be hesitant to recommend a novice to pursue a glue-up/planing project if they weren't already interested in woodworking.
Unless you like the look of veneer on MDF instead of butcher block wood. I think anyone considering IKEA is probably interested in the IKEA finish. After sanding, stain &/ seal is another step people like to avoid
Eh, most IKEA desk hacks is to buy the wooden kitchen countertop, cut it to shape, and put it on some drawers. So you're not really describing anything different.
A butcher block desk with 4x4s for legs is pretty simple and forgiving. Matching the quality of appearance of a lot of other IKEA furniture would require quite a bit more skill and tools.
Like a Kallax, unless you're a real wizard you couldn't cobble one of those together without a lot of skill.
I have a few of those butcher block tops because I scaled down my shop, but I just can't throw them away. one was purchased 50+ years ago and my family used it as a breakfast table. they make excellent work benches and tables. they're robust and attractive. really all you need is a belt sander and some food safe mineral oil and you can completely resurface them if they get funky. I usually just weld a piece of 1/4" angle to a square plate for legs and weld a nut at the bottom for a threaded foot, but you can really do anything. it absolutely lovely to have a clean butcher block top for food preparation.
Most impressive / annoying thing about Ikea is how they keep value engineering products, some products are cheaper relative to inflation vs decades ago, but at the same time it be nice if they just settle one some "timeless" perennial basics like lego. The expedite -> kallax transition still lives rent free in my head, and my curse is being able to identify either sku from a distance.
One of the best furniture life hacks you can recognize is that you can replace the top panel of most self-assembly storage furniture items with a custom work surface suited to your usecase.
Take two drawer units, and instead of putting the tops on them they were supplied with, put a slab of desktop across both of them with a gap between and you’ve got yourself a desk.
As a Kallax enjoyer I used to hate that I was limited to ~32cm width and height, it took me years to realize that I can just remove some of the dividers and make the nooks either wider or taller if I rotate (!) the shelf. It obviously affects load carrying capacity, but it's still plenty strong if you are smart about it.
I was thinking along the lines of Ikea-style furniture from scratch. Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.
> Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.
Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.
> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.
In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.
But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).
I live in Europe, never ever seen a CNC in a hardware store.
I ordered my kitchen fronts from such a place, to fit on … an IKEA kitchen. Giving it a different look, but the benefits of standardised units and the IKEA universe. This was customised mass-production, but still about 3x IKEA price point.
> In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
That's not the case in the US.
The big box hardware stores have a large track saw vertically mounted that can cut full sheets of wood, but there usually isn't someone working who is trained to operate it. They also have a rickety cart with a hand saw and tape measure attached with too short cables that you can try to use to make your cuts of dimensional lumber.
I've long been considering this idea as I make a lot of my own cabinetry, and would love to get automated cutting and drilling lists depending on if I'll use screws or dowel pins or some nice wooden joints.
In general, you always start with outside dimensions, board thickness, having a kick plate or not (eg. when you make it wheeled), will you chamfer/round the edges and then the rest is simple calculation. You add internal shelve/drawer dimensions and it can consider those too.
I had some scripts that worked with an older version of FreeCAD and printed the cutting list to a CSV, but it still was not the perfect solution.
Interestingly, local chipboard/MDF shops here in Serbia would do that as a service for you on their CNC machines (at additional cost, obviously :)).
I think you’re right, and there’s definitely potential for disruption of kitchen and also wardrobe offerings in some countries.
(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)
If you're interested in that I would search for a maker space or hacker space in your area. They usually have tools (like a CNC router) that would be far too expensive for an individual to buy and they let the public use them after taking a short class and paying a membership fee.
Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.
Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.
People like to complain about it not being solid wood but the furniture from Ikea, such as Lack and Kallax is fit for purpose and remains a low price despite the cost of wood going up a lot. And what you can get at a similar price point from Wal-Mart in North America, or Conforama in Europe, is much much worse quality. Especially the veneer which holds up from Ikea but is more like wallpaper if you spend the same price somewhere else.
It depends on your comparison; a Lack table is maybe an extreme example.
I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)
Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.
I'm not using CNC; I just agree with the previous poster that there's an opportunity. (I'd note that none of your subsequent post related to the comment you made about CNC?)
For my project, I believe 19mm is plenty for carcasses - just about every mass-produced kitchen uses 18/19mm chipboard frames, and they can last for decades, outside of abnormal abuse. The main reason for using the same size is easy compatibility with standard doors/fronts together with standard fitment hinges/runners, all of which I'll be purchasing. The tops will be either granite or concrete.
I don't disagree with there being an opportunity or using CNC, I only point out that pinning everything to materials suitable to widely available CNC is too limiting.
Like, using plywood for verticals is overkill, they don't experience any bending, while 19+19 is 48 so you might as well use glued wood board for example.
Billy bookcases though are just slabs of laminated engineered wood cut to rectangular dimensions, drilled with precision positioned and sized holes, plus a stack of dowels and camlock fasteners.
yeah, those cardboard tables.. I had to glue in 2-4 (5 by 10 cm) stringers and refix legs to them for it to hold a measly epson c8600 and even then it stands on wooden planks to distribute the load.
ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.
there's an place in Seattle, WA that does this called shelf.me for what looks like zero-hardware self designs.
my shop is next to a cabinet maker who does most of is work in that same birch hard-ply. he's got the full sheet router, but he only really uses it for special projects. its mostly just the big table saw. he's got a subcontractor that just does drawers. most cities have several of his kind of shop, and while they don't have a design website they generally work from napkins. I think that birch ply has gotten really expensive in the last 5 years though.
At Leroy Merlin, you can order either particle boards, or normal wood boards, whether 16mm for walls, or 30mm for the table top, cut to your sizes (as long as they're rectangular), with end faces laminated as well, and all of that at a fraction of the price.
I had a broken cupboard in a rented apartment, and just built a new replacement one for €15. The bureau in the article could cost 2x..3x of this, which is still lower than overpriced IKEA furniture. (Good furniture, that isn't made of cardboard, is overpriced in IKEA.)
I used to spend hours pouring over the https://ikeahackers.net/ site - but never actually hacked much of our furniture (no more than adjusting the height, or changing handles/worktops).
As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.
I love KALLAX the most of all IKEA series. Sturdy as heck, can take a lot of weight, extremely versatile and durable. I've used it as a bookshelf, for putting boxes away, as a wardrobe organizer, you name it. Oh and the price is right. Nothing else comes close.
Creating luxury closets from the modest PAX platform is my favorite Ikea hack read (currently working on such project). And by the way, the non-nerds take it to a different level.
If people haven't listened to the episode of the podcast Acquired about the history of Ikea[1], I strongly recommend it. Fair warning, it's 3.5h long, but the story is fantastic and the hosts do a great job making it engaging.
I like the Trofast system for making stuff for storing kids toys and organizing their rooms. Honestly there is a lot to love and customize about their offerings for kids and luckily the good stuff also gets picked up by other manufacturers/suppliers, so you get access to other things that go together - furniture too, but also stickers, and other functional decor stuff. Because kids grow up fast and you may be swapping/change their stuff more often, it’s a god send to have these to help out.
For functional sturdy furniture like this, if you are OK with the look, you can make the base/frame from aluminium 80/20 extrusions (the kind with t-slots and all kinds of standard brackets etc for fastening them together). Misumi has a simple CAD interface to design a complete unit, and this generates a single part number for you to purchase everything cut to length, with holes if needed, and all required accessories and fasteners to assemble it. You can easily add a wooden countertop or shelves if desired.
It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).
Re: the slight wobble, you should be able to find some inexpensive thin-sheet backing board at a hardware store. Use small ribbed tacking nails or glue around the edges to attach it at the back, and it should help stabilize and prevent racking.
A non-hack I learned about yesterday. I was taking apart an IKEA dining room table. The screws and bolts were obvious, but the top would not separate from the frame.
After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.
I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.
Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.
Do you have an example of these "furniture panels" that are higher quality and require less effort than a mod to a fully-realized piece of furniture with easy instructions?
I left off "as cheap" because you didn't say it, but it's a huge part of the puzzle that you deliberately ignored, too. But I'm really interested in seeing these "furniture panels" that you're recommending.
In the UK at least, furniture panels from B&Q, Wickes, Selco, etc, are very much inferior to the stuff some IKEA (e.g. METOD and PAX) furniture is built from. That was why I used PAX carcases to create built-in wardrobes. Plain furniture panels would have been lower quality.
I couldn't find any kind of an enclosure that fits the TidyCat Breeze XL litter box. The toy box drawer (Smastad) was big enough, so I cut an entry hole on one side, and a hole on the back side for removing the pad insert.
People do so much hacking and such on things like the Billy bookcase. They'd be just better off getting the plywood and building the carcass themselves, and it'd be 10x more durable than the ikea cardboard version. I've watched several videos of people spending multiple weekends turning them into built-ins....and then at the end of the day, it's still a cheap ikea, cardboard shelf, that will bow under weight, etc....
I wonder about the psychology. Is it like chain restaurants - the brand name and decades of experience guarantees a floor on quality, with people estimating their DIY as having a much lower floor. Plus the laziness of starting from scratch
Then when you start it's obvious sunk cost fallacy
The low cost makes it perfect for diy as for an amateur you know that you have the safety to be able to easily buy a new unit if you screw up.
Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.
In 2014, IKEA made headlines when its legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jules Yap, the founder of IKEA Hackers, demanding that she hand over the domain name. Good to see the site still online, after the PR department took note that legal teams were not-only filing useful claims.
Ever since then, I avoid sharing pictures of IKEA furniture. Like Mattel, suing barbie blogs of children. If I did not design it, I won't share a picture of it. Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
> Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
? In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place).
In the there's the assumption you can photograph anything without a 'do not photo, military dogs' etc.
Never heard of a non-publishable building. Even gchq can be photo's.
In typical HN fashion, the blog post is a run of the mill “hack” and instead of commenting on the article, a Hacker News instead word vomits their favorite IKEA furniture.
An architect friend of mine once said that he admired IKEA above all other furniture manufacturers because it made a modern range of aesthetics available to the masses. IKEA had done more to evolve the public taste than any other manufacturer.
And I do have to agree. I can remember what ghastly furniture most shops used to have around here. There was a lot of what we call "cabin furniture" - which isn't made to look good, just be practical. (Well, some people like that look, but it is a bit...dull). Sure, there was more solid wood furniture, but guess what: that durability comes at a cost. Not only in terms of money, but also in terms of how easy it was to install and move.
And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
As for quality: I have owned some pricey designer furniture and I can't say that I'm always impressed with the quality. Yes, if you have a lot more money you can get really well built furniture. But IKEA is more often than not more than sufficient quality. (Also see their "hidden tags" campaign)
If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price. (Collectible furniture is a whole different deal where you don't actually care all that much about quality, but more about it being an original piece).
For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means. And I'm not trying to make some clever rhetorical point here. I can't really think of any company that offers what they offer and comparable quality, looks and price here in Europe.
> If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price.
That's not the point. A large chunk of the price is the name on it and the marketing/image you associate yourself with. I thin, as engineers, that's hard to relate to. But that is how it works.
The price is not a reflection of quality, it's an outcome of a process to pick a price just enough people are willing to pay.
There is also some life stage appropriate utility in its ~disposable entry tier pricing.
For example, having young kids is not a good time to have a nice teak dining room table. (Or new wood floors for that matter) (or really anything nice you don’t want to hide in a locked box or room)
Also, pets, like a cat is wonderful. But without great diligence a more lower mid-tier couch will get clawed up the same as an ikea special. At least it may be more comfortable in the meantime.
I suspect wealth may be having your cake and eating it too—-you have fancy furniture that kids or pets wreck and you file that under dc.
All of it screams for automated materials reprocessing. One can only hope that the collision of robotics and AI will reduce the amount of landfill we create.
> For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means.
I look in antique/thrift/charity/freecycle/secondhand stores or groups. Where I live you can pick up a solid hardwood dresser for a few hundred bucks, because as you say - nobody wants their parents’ heirlooms. And lots of things can be had for free if you can hire a van to collect.
Also "estate sales/auctions" and/or online returns auctions.
A month ago I got an entire king-size bed headboard (with storage), with cabinets on each side, and a bridge that connects the two cabinets across the top (and has lighting - also there is power in the headboard - needs a few upgrades though).
It was made in 1986 - solid wood.
I paid $1 CAD at an estate sale...
Now, the matching dresser with a tri-fold mirror was $175.
Why the difference? No one wanted the hassle of disassembly for the bed unit - but many felt they could probably flip the dresser.
Admittedly, I had to rent a U-Haul (say about $100 including gas) and rope in a family member to help with the move. (because, it had to be at least 800lbs of awkward parts...)
So, my all in was $276 plus some auction fees.
But - still cheaper, more durable and better looking than most "DIY assembly options".
OTOH - if we move again, this sucker stays with the house...
At least here, you'll also find a lot of IKEA furniture at those stores as well. Most of the nicer stuff tends to go to higher end stores and ends up being rather pricy.
Yes, the tried-and-true first apartment cheap stuff is still there. But the majority of what's for sale in IKEA these days is of significantly better quality (and significantly higher price).
The best alternative to IKEA furniture is more expensive IKEA furniture.
You can easily get better kitchen for example here in Europe, but you have to pay >2x more. Their price/value ratio is stellar usually (but not always). Some designs are great, some are... obscure and I would not want it at home even for free. Taste is eye of the beholder and all that.
One problem is - its sort of take it or leave it. You can't really make custom sized kitchen, you only compose of lego-like bricks and try to cover the inevitable gaps, but they are there. Fine if you don't have constraints, but we do - square-like shape with hard dimensions on all 4 sides. Sloped roof on one side. A lot of custom work and its not perfect, cannot be, its Ikea.
But we got big kitchen for... 11-12k altogether, including artificial stone worktop. Only due to the fact that their sub-contracting company (here in Switzerland!!) messed up first delivery, and white worktop with small black veins came as black with white veins (order came good to factory but out came reverse). Second delivery - each plate was mildly different coloring, so when put together, it looked very cheap and amateurish. Raised with Ikea, after some discussion they offered another one but couldn't guarantee color uniformity. I've chosen another look that would work in any case, but then they seemingly decided cut off that supplier and just returned all the money for worktop, while we kept our current one. Around 5k that was.
Also my massive pet peeve with their kitchen - you have to take their always crappy dishwashers, buying directly say Bosch products won't make them fit well with closing mechanism. I had to throw away perfectly functional Siemens dishwasher and buy their Bosch one. Sounds good, but never ever do Ikea rebrands work the same, offer same quality as originals. That new top of the line (in Ikea) Bosch is massively subpar to older basic Siemens one.
I love IKEA because I could furnish entire office (apart from chairs, they don't have anything of Herman Miller quality) with practical and good looking desks and other fixtures and I didn't spend a fortune. I don't know what it would look like if I had to use other suppliers. Not many showroom if at all, long lead times, often problematic assembly.
> And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
This highly depends on the furniture. As an example, my dad built some custom pieces out of solid oak that are absolutely finding a place in my house after he's gone.
Your father did not buy those so that isn't a counterexample to what the GP said. Clearly, something your father made with his own hands will have a different value to something he bought.
IKEA furniture is great for small adjustments to fit your needs. Not costing a fortune also makes it easier to experiment with it. Since they're so common, it's easy to find CAD drawings for most of them. I did a small hack/conversion on a Billy closet to hide some pipes in our apartment. https://vanderwalt.de/blog/customizing-ikea-billy-to-hide-pi...
My mind immediately went: I’m sure there is some German law or ordinance or regulation against hiding your Gaszähler. This surely goes against die Niederdruckanschlussverordnung.
Now that you have published this online, police will visit you to remove the Billy!
Perhaps I am too pessimistic with German laws.
PS: It looks much better this way.
I really hope not! But it does look much better this way, it was an eyesore. And the regular heizung guys didnt complain when they saw it like this, so im assuming all is well
There is a requirement for having a vents if you are boxing in that device.
One high and one low one, this is so the gas does not build up in case of a leak.
Would highly suggest you get that sorted, your insurance might be void in case you do get a fire.
As long as you can easily slide it out of the way and it isn't fixed to the wall, it wouldn't be a problem for anyone who needs to service it. Therefore, it would not be against regulations, because all regulations in Germany are logical
You need a vent there as well so gas can't build up.
I doubt a billy book case is anywhere near air tight.
It has nothing to do with air tightness.
If it leaks slightly it could keep the gas/air at an explosive ratio within the box.
Best to just have it vent out into the room. then it's noticeable.
Good to know! It slides in/out like a puzzle, so should be fine then.
Wow, that's gorgeous! I hope the other poster isn't right about violating ordinances.
This look lovely and probably felt extremely satisfying once everything was said and done.
Thanks!
I've been pretty disappointed with "medium quality" slightly more expensive furniture from places like west elm and pottery barn.
Now I will either get older recycled furniture for quality or pieces from IKEA for cost.
I’ve just put an IKEA kitchen in. I had to do a very similar modification to fit the plumbing in.
That is weird.
Why is it inside your apartment?
Does someone have to check the meter regularly?
Anyway, great job.
Presumably because it's cheaper. Ours was also originally in home; the utility recently came through and replaced all of ours with exterior units, likely at great cost (horizontal drilling machines aren't cheap)
I suspect the tragedy in Pennsylvania [1] was the catalyst. There are lots of potential issues with keeping these things indoors.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
Meter still looks very accessible to me
Some time ago I realised that second-hand Ikea furniture is a cheap source of material for DIY projects. Facebook Marketplace (UK) has plenty of Pax cupboards which provide useful large boards. Prices vary, but you can pick up almost pristine items for almost nothing. If you don't need whole boards, spot damage is acceptable. Buying similar new materials would perhaps be better, but cost considerably more.
There are tons of websites like this: https://ikeahackers.net/
I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.
I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.
If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
IKEA furniture can hold up very well if you follow the instructions precisely and don't disassemble them (in most cases).
We have furniture from IKEA that we bought at least five years ago that still functions great. A mattress we got from them is absolutely stellar with a memory foam topper; all of our guests love it. I think our coffee table is ten years old now.
However, everything goes to hell once you try to take it apart. This is why our mattresses are not on IKEA bed frames. Taking them apart has ALWAYS weakened them significantly. (We use Thuma Japanese joinery bed frames, which are AMAZING for moving and very high quality).
Which is kind of moot when you're talking about high-quality furniture, as they are usually single pieces as well.
Five years is not much in terms of a furnitures lifespan, i own some pieces my grand grandmother already used that got passed down the generations.
I highly doubt this will happen with ikea furniture. But thats the tradeoff for cheaper and affordable stuff i guess.
I've started wood-gluing together my IKEA and other flat-pack furniture to try and increase its usable life since - as you said - it's counterproductive to dis/re-assemble most of it anyways. I've not been at it long enough to claim effectiveness, but so far nothing has started to wobble.
For what is worth, I had an IKEA kitchen for 12+ years, we disassembled it and gave it to some people that could reuse it, and it's still fine. OTOH my IKEA couch fell apart in half that time, but my wife fixed it up and it lasted until we renovated. We gave that away too.
IKEA has a wide range of products, some fall apart quickly, some last longer.
The finger jointed pine stuff is much more robust than the mdf or hardboard products.
> it is unlikely to survive several moves
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
I don't see this mentioned enough! Wood glue will improve the stability massively.
Obviously beds and huge bookshelves might need to come apart again, so use your best judgement. But chairs, dressers, end-tables, etc. are completely worth it.
This makes any assembly 1-way, though. Some people (with a very high time:money ratio obviously) might find the collapsible, portable nature of Ikea an advantage.
I'm sure I'm not the only person to have built a wall unit in a bedroom only to learn, later, getting it out the door, and through the hall, and down the stairs turns out to be job for Dirk Gently.
That said, moving some of this flat pack furniture has been a mixed bag. Some move well, some don't.
I did have a wall unit, a $99 hardware store particle board piece assembled with big screws and those interesting, round cam fasteners. It survived three separate moves, including one where it flew out the back of my pickup truck onto asphalt (thankfully in a gas station, vs the freeway I was about to get on). Corner got dinged, door flew off, but it survived!
But I've had other pieces that assemble and are rigid, when torqued around through the moving process start to come undone. The particle board and fasteners are designed for loads only in specific directions and tend to not do well, and fail, outside of those.
I've owned a lot of IKEA furniture, and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them. And I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a flatpack-to-furniture-to-flatpack design.
> I've owned a lot of IKEA furniture
same.
> and at no point have I ever considered disassembling them
That is wise. I don't claim disassembling it for move was a good idea, but it compressed my stuff into a compact car.
Consider also that some of their beds don't fit through a doorway built (esp if doorway is not code width) so some level of disassembly may be required for mere room-to-room moving.
I'm only calling out a tradeoff that may or may not apply. Not everyone is you and me.
> I don't think IKEA really even advertises their stuff to be a
The whole point of this thread (this site?) is repurposing outside of creator intent.
Cool website, thanks for the link!
Really liked this garden sink for barbecuing: https://ikeahackers.net/2017/06/outdoor-sink-perfect-summer-...
No many real furniture out there with entire ecosystem of storage/containers sized for it. IKEA sheet/stamped metal stuff that introduced a few years ago will last forever.
I've got the Ikea PLATSA wardrobe and none of their organisers fit properly in the drawers. My wife instead got some of the MUJI organisers and those fit much better because they're made of cloth/canvas thus bendy/squishy.
I think my GALANT desk with a glass top survived multiple moves, including one that had it travel about 800 km in a trailer. Worked fine until the day I got a standing desk, at which point I put it up online and someone bought it from me. That desk might still be kicking around to this day.
I think really the only IKEA product that has given me issues is the MARKUS chair, and more specifically, the gas spring leaking. Apart from that, I think everything is more or less functional? Even the five-euro LACK coffee table is still fine, even if it has signs of use on it. I've also bought used IKEA shelves and they're still holding up fine.
> If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
IKEA is ideal for a certain stage of your life. It's ideal for optimizing vertical space. It's largely function over form. It looks like middle school classroom furniture. And when junior writes on it w/ a sharpie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
When you have the space for a separate dining room, agreed that used antiques are comparable in price.
I wouldn't touch their couches rich or poor though; they're painful.
It's very use and location dependent. I'm going to get a good or at least relatively good dining room table. Some cubbyholes/shelves for a closet? IKEA is fine. I also have an IKEA bureau in my bedroom. I occasionally wonder if I should have splurged on a "real" piece of furniture but it saved me thousands of dollars and is perfectly adequate.
I have an IKEA LANDSKRONA (in Gunnared dark grey) and it's a good sofa for like 650 €. I don't think I've really considered sofas to be that markedly better than mine even if they're double or quadruple the cost.
Whenever I looked at using IKEA stuff to hack or incorporate into a larger build, the cost, effort, and quality never seemed worth it to me.
I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.
If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.
I also did a butcher block top. Cut it down and routed to perfectly flow around what passes for a "straight wall" in this house, spent entirely too long sanding and finishing.
Then put it on some IKEA drawer blocks, because I want drawers, but I'm not equipped to build those in any reasonable timeframe.
Cutting down a desk top is something you can do with sawhorses and some good weather. More intricate things need an actual workshop for good results.
I did something similar, but just bought the wooden desk top from Ikea. Sanded/stained and added some standing desk legs. Perfect balance between customization and not building from scratch.
I'd be hesitant to recommend a novice to pursue a glue-up/planing project if they weren't already interested in woodworking.
Unless you like the look of veneer on MDF instead of butcher block wood. I think anyone considering IKEA is probably interested in the IKEA finish. After sanding, stain &/ seal is another step people like to avoid
Eh, most IKEA desk hacks is to buy the wooden kitchen countertop, cut it to shape, and put it on some drawers. So you're not really describing anything different.
Their point is the effort vs quality.
A butcher block desk with 4x4s for legs is pretty simple and forgiving. Matching the quality of appearance of a lot of other IKEA furniture would require quite a bit more skill and tools.
Like a Kallax, unless you're a real wizard you couldn't cobble one of those together without a lot of skill.
I have a few of those butcher block tops because I scaled down my shop, but I just can't throw them away. one was purchased 50+ years ago and my family used it as a breakfast table. they make excellent work benches and tables. they're robust and attractive. really all you need is a belt sander and some food safe mineral oil and you can completely resurface them if they get funky. I usually just weld a piece of 1/4" angle to a square plate for legs and weld a nut at the bottom for a threaded foot, but you can really do anything. it absolutely lovely to have a clean butcher block top for food preparation.
Most impressive / annoying thing about Ikea is how they keep value engineering products, some products are cheaper relative to inflation vs decades ago, but at the same time it be nice if they just settle one some "timeless" perennial basics like lego. The expedite -> kallax transition still lives rent free in my head, and my curse is being able to identify either sku from a distance.
One of the best furniture life hacks you can recognize is that you can replace the top panel of most self-assembly storage furniture items with a custom work surface suited to your usecase.
Take two drawer units, and instead of putting the tops on them they were supplied with, put a slab of desktop across both of them with a gap between and you’ve got yourself a desk.
As a Kallax enjoyer I used to hate that I was limited to ~32cm width and height, it took me years to realize that I can just remove some of the dividers and make the nooks either wider or taller if I rotate (!) the shelf. It obviously affects load carrying capacity, but it's still plenty strong if you are smart about it.
Sidenote "Kallax enjoyer" is a great thing to from an identity around and I'm updating my Twitter bio as we speak
I was thinking along the lines of Ikea-style furniture from scratch. Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.
> Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.
Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.
> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.
In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.
But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).
I live in Europe, never ever seen a CNC in a hardware store.
I ordered my kitchen fronts from such a place, to fit on … an IKEA kitchen. Giving it a different look, but the benefits of standardised units and the IKEA universe. This was customised mass-production, but still about 3x IKEA price point.
> In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
That's not the case in the US.
The big box hardware stores have a large track saw vertically mounted that can cut full sheets of wood, but there usually isn't someone working who is trained to operate it. They also have a rickety cart with a hand saw and tape measure attached with too short cables that you can try to use to make your cuts of dimensional lumber.
I've long been considering this idea as I make a lot of my own cabinetry, and would love to get automated cutting and drilling lists depending on if I'll use screws or dowel pins or some nice wooden joints.
In general, you always start with outside dimensions, board thickness, having a kick plate or not (eg. when you make it wheeled), will you chamfer/round the edges and then the rest is simple calculation. You add internal shelve/drawer dimensions and it can consider those too.
I had some scripts that worked with an older version of FreeCAD and printed the cutting list to a CSV, but it still was not the perfect solution.
Interestingly, local chipboard/MDF shops here in Serbia would do that as a service for you on their CNC machines (at additional cost, obviously :)).
I think you’re right, and there’s definitely potential for disruption of kitchen and also wardrobe offerings in some countries.
(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)
If you're interested in that I would search for a maker space or hacker space in your area. They usually have tools (like a CNC router) that would be far too expensive for an individual to buy and they let the public use them after taking a short class and paying a membership fee.
That would be very expensive compared to ikea.
Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.
Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.
People like to complain about it not being solid wood but the furniture from Ikea, such as Lack and Kallax is fit for purpose and remains a low price despite the cost of wood going up a lot. And what you can get at a similar price point from Wal-Mart in North America, or Conforama in Europe, is much much worse quality. Especially the veneer which holds up from Ikea but is more like wallpaper if you spend the same price somewhere else.
Solid wood is also a nightmare to move.
It depends on your comparison; a Lack table is maybe an extreme example.
I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)
Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.
I applaud you and your project.
But CNC isn't the silver bullet. What I ended up with is 25mm glued wood for frames, 55mm for tops and 15mm plywood plus veneer for facades.
If you use 19mm for frames, you won't have enough strength for hinges, which would inevitably be abused.
If you use 19mm for tops, they will sag and vibrate. The best top I have is actually 55mm IKEA glued oak.
I'm not using CNC; I just agree with the previous poster that there's an opportunity. (I'd note that none of your subsequent post related to the comment you made about CNC?)
For my project, I believe 19mm is plenty for carcasses - just about every mass-produced kitchen uses 18/19mm chipboard frames, and they can last for decades, outside of abnormal abuse. The main reason for using the same size is easy compatibility with standard doors/fronts together with standard fitment hinges/runners, all of which I'll be purchasing. The tops will be either granite or concrete.
I don't disagree with there being an opportunity or using CNC, I only point out that pinning everything to materials suitable to widely available CNC is too limiting.
Like, using plywood for verticals is overkill, they don't experience any bending, while 19+19 is 48 so you might as well use glued wood board for example.
Billy bookcases though are just slabs of laminated engineered wood cut to rectangular dimensions, drilled with precision positioned and sized holes, plus a stack of dowels and camlock fasteners.
That seems parameterizable.
yeah, those cardboard tables.. I had to glue in 2-4 (5 by 10 cm) stringers and refix legs to them for it to hold a measly epson c8600 and even then it stands on wooden planks to distribute the load.
ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.
there's an place in Seattle, WA that does this called shelf.me for what looks like zero-hardware self designs.
my shop is next to a cabinet maker who does most of is work in that same birch hard-ply. he's got the full sheet router, but he only really uses it for special projects. its mostly just the big table saw. he's got a subcontractor that just does drawers. most cities have several of his kind of shop, and while they don't have a design website they generally work from napkins. I think that birch ply has gotten really expensive in the last 5 years though.
At Leroy Merlin, you can order either particle boards, or normal wood boards, whether 16mm for walls, or 30mm for the table top, cut to your sizes (as long as they're rectangular), with end faces laminated as well, and all of that at a fraction of the price.
I had a broken cupboard in a rented apartment, and just built a new replacement one for €15. The bureau in the article could cost 2x..3x of this, which is still lower than overpriced IKEA furniture. (Good furniture, that isn't made of cardboard, is overpriced in IKEA.)
I used to spend hours pouring over the https://ikeahackers.net/ site - but never actually hacked much of our furniture (no more than adjusting the height, or changing handles/worktops).
As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.
I love KALLAX the most of all IKEA series. Sturdy as heck, can take a lot of weight, extremely versatile and durable. I've used it as a bookshelf, for putting boxes away, as a wardrobe organizer, you name it. Oh and the price is right. Nothing else comes close.
Creating luxury closets from the modest PAX platform is my favorite Ikea hack read (currently working on such project). And by the way, the non-nerds take it to a different level.
https://erinkestenbaum.com/2018/12/12/hacking-the-ikea-pax-i...
If people haven't listened to the episode of the podcast Acquired about the history of Ikea[1], I strongly recommend it. Fair warning, it's 3.5h long, but the story is fantastic and the hosts do a great job making it engaging.
[1] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/ikea
IKEA hacks are the perfect way to get into woodworking. Low prices mean you don’t have to stress about making mistakes!
"Hacking" when used in the context of furniture actually means breaking it with an axe.
What’s the distinction between hacking, whacking, and chopping? And how can we incorporate these terms into tech?
I like the Trofast system for making stuff for storing kids toys and organizing their rooms. Honestly there is a lot to love and customize about their offerings for kids and luckily the good stuff also gets picked up by other manufacturers/suppliers, so you get access to other things that go together - furniture too, but also stickers, and other functional decor stuff. Because kids grow up fast and you may be swapping/change their stuff more often, it’s a god send to have these to help out.
Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione Some 52 years ago.
https://archiyou.com/articles/enzo-mari-s-autoprogettazione-...
For functional sturdy furniture like this, if you are OK with the look, you can make the base/frame from aluminium 80/20 extrusions (the kind with t-slots and all kinds of standard brackets etc for fastening them together). Misumi has a simple CAD interface to design a complete unit, and this generates a single part number for you to purchase everything cut to length, with holes if needed, and all required accessories and fasteners to assemble it. You can easily add a wooden countertop or shelves if desired.
It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).
Re: the slight wobble, you should be able to find some inexpensive thin-sheet backing board at a hardware store. Use small ribbed tacking nails or glue around the edges to attach it at the back, and it should help stabilize and prevent racking.
A non-hack I learned about yesterday. I was taking apart an IKEA dining room table. The screws and bolts were obvious, but the top would not separate from the frame.
After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.
I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.
Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.
I recently did my own hack that turned out great - it’s a drawer + desk hack. It takes some planning, but so satisfying when it works out:) https://www.reddit.com/r/ikeahacks/comments/1srj3g9/malm_m%C...
Always wonder why those "IKEA Hackers" don't just start from plain furiture panels. More quality for very little less effort.
Do you have an example of these "furniture panels" that are higher quality and require less effort than a mod to a fully-realized piece of furniture with easy instructions?
I left off "as cheap" because you didn't say it, but it's a huge part of the puzzle that you deliberately ignored, too. But I'm really interested in seeing these "furniture panels" that you're recommending.
In the UK at least, furniture panels from B&Q, Wickes, Selco, etc, are very much inferior to the stuff some IKEA (e.g. METOD and PAX) furniture is built from. That was why I used PAX carcases to create built-in wardrobes. Plain furniture panels would have been lower quality.
I couldn't find any kind of an enclosure that fits the TidyCat Breeze XL litter box. The toy box drawer (Smastad) was big enough, so I cut an entry hole on one side, and a hole on the back side for removing the pad insert.
People do so much hacking and such on things like the Billy bookcase. They'd be just better off getting the plywood and building the carcass themselves, and it'd be 10x more durable than the ikea cardboard version. I've watched several videos of people spending multiple weekends turning them into built-ins....and then at the end of the day, it's still a cheap ikea, cardboard shelf, that will bow under weight, etc....
I wonder about the psychology. Is it like chain restaurants - the brand name and decades of experience guarantees a floor on quality, with people estimating their DIY as having a much lower floor. Plus the laziness of starting from scratch
Then when you start it's obvious sunk cost fallacy
Minimum Carpentry Protocol (MCP)
Love a good IKEA hack. Readily available, standardized, low-cost materials are a great platform to build creatively!
What is the device at the end that looks like a laser engraver sans laser module?
Ahh I just created a blog post about my Ikea Helmer modification: https://atoav.com/2026/08/30/ikea-helmer-mod/
Turning the thing into something a little bit more mobile.
Build more real stuff, everyone.
I have this whole website dedicated to it bookmarked since a long time: https://ikeahackers.net/
The low cost makes it perfect for diy as for an amateur you know that you have the safety to be able to easily buy a new unit if you screw up.
Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.
There’s <https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack>
https://ikeahackers.net/
In 2014, IKEA made headlines when its legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jules Yap, the founder of IKEA Hackers, demanding that she hand over the domain name. Good to see the site still online, after the PR department took note that legal teams were not-only filing useful claims.
Ever since then, I avoid sharing pictures of IKEA furniture. Like Mattel, suing barbie blogs of children. If I did not design it, I won't share a picture of it. Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
> Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
? In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place). In the there's the assumption you can photograph anything without a 'do not photo, military dogs' etc. Never heard of a non-publishable building. Even gchq can be photo's.
Check the "Freedom of Panorama" article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama - lots of restrictions around the world.
Taking photos and publishing photos are 2 different things. The first one doesn't involve copyright for a start.
> In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place).
Just because you can photograph it does not mean you can necessarily publish it. IP rights are a recognized exception to the 1a
In typical HN fashion, the blog post is a run of the mill “hack” and instead of commenting on the article, a Hacker News instead word vomits their favorite IKEA furniture.