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
Same with old appliances.
And old cars…
And old people
And old toys
Even sex toys?
I have a prehistoric dildo, it still works perfectly.
What do you mean, “just a rock”?
This is true. I’m getting close to 50 and I’m already a good 37% dust.
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 👍
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.
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.
Balsa is hardwood Yew is softwood
Yew is 16x stronger
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.
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.
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.
Part of the problem with those antique pieces is that they’re a bitch to move.
Meh… I’m not the best woodworker but I’m not terrible. I’d hope by that time I can at least leave them a decent handcrafted stained table or chair or something. No giant frescoes but nice routered edges on solid wood with a good burn+stain and a thick layer of lacquer.
That totally leads to Narnia
Where does the IKEA one lead?
Nørniä obviously
Now I finally understand the naming conventions at Ikea
The Wall-E world
A Target in Modesto
The self checkout line in a Walmart after an especially hot summer day.
Will there be mythical creatures there too?
They left you the closet to Narnia?
My grandparents didn’t leave me anything
For real. And nothing against them, but they weren’t exactly in a position to be hoarding possessions. They left me memories and recipes, and that’s good enough.
Mine didn’t even leave me that. I got trauma and debt
You’re in luck then, debts don’t transfer!!
Mine left me genetic disabilities
…psshhhhh - as if i’ll ever be able to afford kids to someday give me grandkids…
…i’ll die destitute and alone in a gutter somewhere and i’ve made my peace with that…
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.
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 used to just not wear any shoes. The poorest were barefoot or wrapped their feet in rags.
I wonder why simple shoes (like a piece of wood and some cord) picked up in the East but not in the West.
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.
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)
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.
People bought mail order houses, which I think confirms the popularity of lightweight and portable big purchase items.
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 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.
My kitchen table is a hand me down from my parents, is at least 30 years old, never been maintained, and even has a nice big scar in it from a science experiment gone wrong (my dad sanctioned it so it’s mostly his fault. He underestimated the potency of what he helped me make). It still works like a champ.
I’ve been wanted to sand and restain it for a while though. If nothing else so I can actually make the surface level again. Even bought the supplies. But I’m lazy and other things have taken priority. Like commenting on Lemmy.
Just checking, what product do you “stain” your table with?
Pepsi
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.
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.
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.
What Douglas Coupland calls semi-disposable Swedish furniture.
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.
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?
If you actually have good parents, there is no need to. Unless you’re over 18 the money typically goes to your parents anyway.
A whole a house or just this room?
Anyway: Amazing.
All I got was the IKEA family card. Free coffee. Yeah.
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!
The one on the left is built to last longer, and is practically timeless. The one on the right will probably fall apart after a few years of use, and eschews fucntion for a more “modern” design that will inevitably fall out of style.
(Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this.)
I have some ikea pieces that I bought when I started grad school. They’re 10 years old, have been through 4 moves, and they’re still doing fine. Even better, I could move them myself without it being a huge strain. They aren’t high quality (which tends to seem to mean heavy and not disassemblable), but they’ve treated me pretty well.
One on the left is very sophisticated and whoever made it, definitely put in countless hours sculpting it. People downvoting thinking the one on the right is better are batshit insane.
If I want a work of art the left one is nice, but if I just want a fucking shelf you’re insane to think it’s the better option there. You really can’t compare the two, they serve completely separate purposes
I’d 100% prefer the one on the right. Just dusting the thing on the left would take forever, and moving it would be a gigantic pain in the ass.
I have already decided the one my grandparents left me is sitting there until the house burns down or I die. I’m not moving it again.
Ikea’s stuff is fine for the price you pay. Oddly enough their solid pine items are really sturdy and usually among the cheapest since it’s so simple and comes unfinished. I have a Tarva queen sized bed and it’s great, plus I bought $8 of 2x2 and made custom length legs for it.
The one on the left wasn’t necessarily built to last longer. It was probably absurdly expensive back in the day and there were plenty of more cheaply made(but admittedly solid wood) options. No one is taking pictures of those less flashy pieces, though. Also you say timeless but, c’mon, it’s cool and all but definitely doesn’t fit everywhere. It screams “medieval castle” and is pretty over-the-top for basically any modern home, even grandma’s place.
The other thing about those shelves is that they’re a lot lighter than solid wood. When you want to place them in fun locations and need to use drywall anchors it’s a big thing to reduce the weight where you can. It’s not like people are displaying bowlingballs in them. They last a plenty long time unless you have a habit of trashing your place and there’s certainly such a thing as “over-built”. If that shelf “inevitably falls out of style” then style moves slower than I thought because they’ve been making and selling that thing for-fuckin’-ever. Most importantly it’s affordable in today’s world where executives have siphoned away all our money and the working class has been left without the funds to invest in quality furniture when the Ikea stuff does just fine.
—
TL;DR the piece on the left was not common when it was made and the piece on the right has its merits, not least of which is accessibility.
I have several IKEA pieces that I bought when I arrived in Canada in 2007 and are still going strong.
Same. My collection of cheap ass MDF / particleboard furniture has survived 4 moves and 10 years lol
May have mixed feelings about the “timeless” bit, depending deeply on how it’s meant. Do I think you’ll find a buyer at any given time in the foreseeable future? Probably, yes. But I would have very mixed feelings about having that in my house. (Space consumption, cool on its own to some degree but clashing with basically everything else and cherubs are not my jam, maybe a status symbol since it isn’t the norm.)
No wooden babies in my bedroom tyvm
Idk the one on the right seems more like it’s throwing out any kind of style to be purely for function
sad white furniture for sad white homes
As someone who’s moved a several tons of the furniture on the left, I’ll take the shit on the right all day. Not only is the shit on the left always incredibly heavy, it’s also ugly as hell and takes up an ungodly amount of space
Meh, the cost of each is vastly different
Yes, that is part of the joke.
OMG we’re totally twinning
$300 for yours if you wanna help me complete my set?
