What Douglas Coupland calls semi-disposable Swedish furniture.
My grandparents didn’t leave me anything
Mine left me genetic disabilities
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!!
C U B E
Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!
Easier to clean I guess
The only thing my kids will inherit from me is ADHD.
Left: useless because it’s ugly as hell and won’t fit in anywhere. Right: useless because it falls apart if you sneeze at it.
The amount of dust it will collect in all those crevices !!
Just order your maid to dust it twice daily with a feather duster, duh
Actually, the right looks like a Kallax, which are probably the sturdiest item in their catalogue given the walls are like 3cm (1.2 in) thick. I’ve taken them apart and reassembled them before, and unlike every other piece of Ikea furniture I’ve done that to, they’re actually just as stable and reliable as before.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Too exhausted to grab images but…
- 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.
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…
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.
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”.
Starbucks isn’t Italian, for one.
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.
one is significantly 1) more useful and 2) does not cost $4000 to move next time the shitty apartment you’re renting gets sold to be “renovated” into luxury (cardboard) condos.
The one on the left is definitely more haunted, though.
…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…
