> I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.
The thing is, antique stores are stuffed to the gills with heirloom class furniture, and it doesn’t cost 100x the amount. Gorgeous solid cherry, mahogany, etc, where even the backs and drawer bottoms are solid can be had for a song. We recently tried to find a mostly solid wood IKEA dresser, but because they’re switching all their designs to new anti-tip designs over the next few months, almost everything was out of stock. So we decided to look a bit further afield, and we went to our local antique shop. We ended up spending $600 for a totally refinished solid cherry dresser, delivered into our room. It’s stunning, totally solid cherry, and I think slightly less expensive than the IKEA dresser we were trying to get. Not spending 2 hours cranking screws was a really nice bonus.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s necessarily true everywhere. We replaced our IKEA (or equivalent) stuff with solid wood antiques and they were all $1000+. We had only two items to really replace, but compared to the $50 that the IKEA stuff cost it was quite an expense.
Yeah, maybe this place was unusually cheap, but chatting with the owner made it sound like the supply far outstripped the demand, so I don’t think that’s fundamentally true. That said, I’d still take the $1000 solid antique over the $600 mostly solid IKEA piece.
I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.