Another lesson of Ikea is that often you cannot move them from one home/apartment to another, because if you try to take it apart and then reassemble it, it's never the same.
To extend this via analogy to the software realm, a deep refactoring is problematic whereas OTOH a complete rewrite is a better idea.
Which has not borne borne out by industry experience.
I have moved many times with Ikea furniture and purchased it used with no problems. Ikea furniture is some of the most disassemble and reassemble-able furniture I've seen.
My oldest Ikea piece is a 4x2 EXPEDIT shelf which has been moved three times now. Twice across town in a car (disassembled and reassembled), once across states (still assembled on a truck). It’s doing fine.
My nightstand only went through the truck move though, and it has chunks missing on the bottom corners. The moving company warned us that it was common and they would refuse to move it unless we we willing to forgo any damage claims on those pieces.
I think it has a lot to do with the design of each individual product, it’s hard to generalize about how durable they are. The bottom corners of HAUGA are a weak material and not well supported, if it gets hit there or maybe even catches on the floor while sliding sideways it’s going to crunch.
>The moving company warned us that it was common and they would refuse to move it unless we we willing to forgo any damage claims on those pieces.
I mean, talking about having you over a barrel. They know precisely that you will not stop, and find another mover. All they need to do is stretch wrap the bejeebus out of the bottom to protect those exposed pressed wood chips, but they don't want to have to do that, so they have you give them a waiver and move on to not caring
People do sell things when moving - there are options between "pay us to move it on our terms" and "you don't have any other choices". Sell on one side and replace on the other is entirely reasonable for risky-to-move items.
Usually, it's moving day when these conversations are happening when the actual movers are there. Not much time to sell on the side if that's when you're being told
Exactly. Movers were there, we had a day left in the apartment after they emptied it to finish up cleaning and pack what was going in our car.
Selling Ikea furniture during the summer when the college students are gone and having to price it to sell the same day, we probably would've got $5. Not worth it at all.
Honestly I'd rather have the damaged furniture than waste that much plastic trying to protect it. If it really bothered me I could patch it up with scrap wood and white paint that I already have sitting around.
Everyone seems to chime in with comments confirming your experience, so let me add an opposite take: all IKEA furniture I ever dealt with were... at best, meh. Some may look almost durable when assembled, but they start to accumulate damage over months to years of regular use. Not careless use, but also not super-careful use as if it were a museum piece. Just regular use.
Which is why I too claim that all IKEA furniture I dealt with can barely survive disassembly and reassembly - by the time I wanted them moved somewhere, they've accumulated too much structural damage.
More recently - i.e. in the last 5-8 years - all the new IKEA furniture I dealt with felt... flimsy and dangerous out of the box. Now, a wobbly wardrobe or a bookshelf that looks like it'll break apart if you push it sideways is tolerable in an apartment with two sober, working adults - but the moment a child was to enter the picture, we made sure to screw all IKEA furniture to the wall, and ever since, we don't assemble wardrobes and other "fixed" furniture ourselves - we pay a handyman to do it, and to reinforce them structurally with metal elements and glue, and then screw them to the walls or otherwise do whatever is necessary to ensure nothing will collapse or topple when mishandled by a small child.
In short: to me, IKEA furniture looks nice until you start using it, and is otherwise rather fragile. But it's cheap, and still miles better than any other flat-pack furniture vendor, so like everyone else, that's what we buy.
I suppose that how durable IKEA furniture is depends a lot on what you choose.
For instance I have bought some IKEA metallic tables and these do not contain anything that is fragile or that may be damaged without a huge effort to do that.
After some 5 years there is no visible difference from the day when I have assembled them and I do not expect any to appear soon. They look like they will easily outlive me.
If I had bought some flimsy tables made of some wood substitute or dubious plastic, then yes, I would have expected them to not age well.
> I suppose that how durable IKEA furniture is depends a lot on what you choose.
It absolutely does. They have several quality/price tiers for most IKEA furniture that rather predictable goes from particle board to plywood to solid wood. The materials are listed on the tag in the IKEA showroom so I literally just look for the product that have only solid wood (and veneer if applicable).
The particle board is crap that quickly deteriorates, especially if you spill anything on the exposed particle board. The plywood is actually quite good if you apply a little wood glue to the joints, and the solid wood is usually the best bang for the buck furniture you can buy outside of craigslist heirloom pieces.
It is in the instructions (which typically don't have words, IIRC.) Brackets have been included with all shelves we've purchased - even ones that seem short & sturdy enough to use it.
IKEA also sells furniture of varying qualities - for example, KALLAX is a well-known line of shelves that many vinyl enthusiasts use to store records. Records are extremely heavy, but these stand the test of time.
Another example is in the bedroom department: MALM vs KULLEN. The former is much thicker and sturdier, with drawers that have metal hardware. Kullen on the other hand is thinner, flimsy, and uses plastic hardware for the drawers, giving them an awful tactile feel.
To +1 this: it's in the instructions for every shelving unit you can buy, because it's a major safety issue regardless of construction (unless it's impractically deep compared to its height). It isn't the construction that makes them tip, it's the dimensions. If it doesn't warn you, it's because they assume you know the risk of things falling onto you, and/or they aren't willing to spend a tiny bit of money to warn you and provide anchoring locations/tools.
Which absolutely do exist. But they're not any safer due to cutting corners on safety. IKEA deserves applause for the consistent warning and hardware.
"After recalling millions of tip-prone dressers that killed at least nine children and injured dozens, Ikea said shoppers must acknowledge the risk that furniture could tip over onto children before making a purchase."
> all IKEA furniture I ever dealt with were... at best, meh
Also, can we get a raise of hands on the number of people who have vs have not been successful in disassembling and reassembling IKEA BILLY bookshelves? I am fully convinced that it is near impossible for your average person to disassemble and reassemble BILLY bookshelves without damage.
I have a number of shelves possibly still sitting in storage at the university I studied at years ago, of all places. For two reasons. One, that I could not find anyone to help me get back in the room where they are stored after I left said university. Two, because I was so sceptical of ever being able to disassemble those bookshelves that I thought it better to leave them there until I could find a way to transport them without having to disassemble them again.
It's been years. I wonder if the shelves are still down there in the dank basement of the chemistry building of the University of Oslo alongside other PING student union things.
BILLY is the shelf where you stop the back panel with nails or rivets, right ?
It's absolutely not made to be disasembled. You'd need to go with the HEMNES line to have something a bit more solid and well thought out.
People put all IKEA stuff in the same basket, but they have different designers who can have pretty different philosophies on how the furnitures are structured. Some are really clever, others really cheap and dumb. Their EXPEDIT / KALLAX line is another line that is extremely good regarding flexibility and modularity. We actually use two as bookshelves.
I'm definitely keeping my hands down. IKEA BILLY are the ones we've inherited from the previous owners when moving in to the current apartment, and we had a handyman reinforce each one in the entire row with angle braces, and then screw them together so they don't flex independently, and then screw them to the wall - and only at that point we felt comfortable enough to start putting books into them.
We've also inherited a few spare elements for BILLYs, I think some doors and shelves, never unpacked. I believe the previous owner gave up at the idea of attaching them to the assembled bookshelves, and never bothered to return them to the store.
I disassembled and reassembled BILLY bookshelves after 4 years without any visible damage, and they served for another 3+ years until I moved overseas and sold them. Not sure if they survived the second move, but they definitely did the first time.
I've got four BILLY bookshelves that are 24 years old. I've taking them with me the eight times I moved. And they were disassembled multiple times. But I am not sure whether any currently sold BILLY bookshelves would be that durable.
IKEA has different levels of "robustness" in their products. The Broder and Värde product lines (both no longer offered) are almost industrial strength and you can be sure that they will survive many relocations, while others, especially cabinest with flimsy backs that are tacked with nails may not survive moving even once.
YMMV, but I have succesfully moved such a wardrobe (disassembled, obviously - I pulled all the nails out and removed the "flimsy" back, then removed and packed the rest of the frame). It survived just fine.
Would relate to this. Even with normal wear and tear, reassembly isn't a problem.
Perhaps the difference stems from how rushed/impatient one was during initial assembly. I do know a couple pieces where that happened and it resulted in wonky furniture because this knob was jammed in or that bit was misaligned for months. Would make sense considering a lot of people feel excited after purchasing it that they don't take their time with assembly.
This is mostly for the older pieces, I know a lot of them now you have to really mess up for it to affect future reassembly.
The particle/flake board stuff doesn't do well during disassembly. The threads and bore holes for the various pegs that hold the boards develop cracks an begin to crumble. When you start applying force during disassembly the weakened particle board gives way and the pins pull out of the flake board. Spent half a day repairing a nice looking flake board Ikea book case a friend gave me when he moved. Half of the pins ripped out and two shelves split during disassembly. Wood glue and epoxy putty to the rescue.
IKEA furniture varies a lot in quality (especially across years) so talking about them as a whole is difficult. I could never get the Bestå doors straight, but the Malms seem pretty sturdy. Lack things (especially the simple end table) looks like they wouldn't survive being assembled the first time, nevermind moving it…
Some movers once mentioned that old IKEA stuff was in general great, then they were terrible, and then they were just okay. Since they resigned Billy about a year ago†, they're probably going to get cheaper again.
Taking it down and re-assembling it honestly makes it last longer. If you start moving a structure made of a bunch of non-ridged squares, you're going to widen every hole and loosen every screw.
I've also moved it, but rarely disassemble. Drawers out, sure, but otherwise just move intact. Can almost always Tetris stuff together so it doesn't really save any space.
Adding wood glue to any places with dowels or even any joints is a pretty cheap, low-effort way to get a 2-3x life multiplier on that type of furniture. As long as you don't want to disassemble again, of course.
I moved a ikea shelve through 3 flats and two nations. Ultimately I gifted it away because the new space wouldn't fit it and my requirements had changed, but I know people who are in the 5th flat.
As long as you are treating the stuff right it should survive a few assembly-disassembly-cycles. Key is of couese to sort the screws, mark the parts with tape, etc.
Anecdotally I have had trouble reconciling this seemingly prevalent "you can't disassemble Ikea furniture" with my own experience. It's not made for it sure but bookshelves, bed frames and tables can all be reassembled reasonably well. Anything smaller you can just put in the truck when moving.
I think a big reason for this reputation is that IKEA is one of the few furniture brands big enough to have a wider-than-normal range of product tiers. Most brands have only one or two that are typically close together, while IKEA has at least three covering a much broader range of manufacturing methods and materials.
And while you can get lucky with products in the lowest tier (I have some 15-year-old seating that fits this mold), often you do need to step up to at least the mid-tier to get something that will make it unscathed through moves.
Again one of those impossible to kill memes, along with bad mounting instructions (they are on par with Lego, and way better than a lot of industry ones). Usually tells you more about the person making that point than about the point they try to make.
> along with bad mounting instructions (they are on par with Lego, and way better than a lot of industry ones
After reading Visual Thinking, I think this is a different brains problem. Some people just aren’t able to object visualize and need written step by step instructions.
We tested this with my girlfriend using a LEGO set. In the time I blazed through 5 bags of Lego, she barely managed to get 1 assembled. Because she just struggles with visual instruction and manipulating objects in her mind.
The opposite happens with sequential written instructions. I struggle to follow simple recipes without pictures and have to re-read the same step multiple times to get what they’re saying, whereas she can blaze through no problem and doesn’t understand why I’m struggling.
IMO Lego are the gold standard of instructions. From what a remember, IKEA also does labeled bags with a small subset of pieces.
While I think IKEA instructions are clear enough, they feel frustrating at times, while Lego feels very satisfying. Maybe it is the full color of the Lego instructions, or that the consequences of a mistake are easier to undo? Or the lego units make it easier to count the distances. Or maybe my love of Lego is stronger than the often chore of assembling furniture, in a pavlovian way? :)
Well, to me, the furniture quality is meh, and they're quite fragile, but instructions are indeed good enough - and miles better than competition.
One thing I specifically appreciate about IKEA instructions is the attention to detail in the drawings. With almost every IKEA purchase, at some point I hit a moment where some elements can be mated in several orientations, and there isn't an obvious way to tell which is the correct one. Sometimes it's apparent if you look couple steps ahead, but I found that you can always find a clue somewhere in the drawing of the unclear step. It's usually something like one of the elements having asymmetrically sized or arranged holes, which translates to a difference of 0.25mm to 1mm between some dots on the paper drawing. It's tiny, but it's always there, corresponding precisely to the piece I have in front of me.
Of course, this could've been done better in many ways, but at least they care about precision of their drawings. Of companies in this space I had experience with, no one else does.
Anyone who’s ever finished putting together a piece of IKEA furniture only to realize they missed a few parts knows you can take it apart and put it back together perfectly fine.
IKEA instructions are the best instructions there exist, imo. You can consistently follow the steps. We had much worst experience with instructions feom other shops.
For bookshelves in particular (and wardrobes which have it too), I've found that trying to remove the nailed-in particleboard from the back usually goes really poorly. For furniture that doesn't have that, I agree with you.
The trick is to use screws from the start and throw away the nails. Also make notes on the back, to mark what part goes where and in what direction.
And lastly, have a 90° gage to make sure all corners have right angles. This is very crucial. Sometimes floors are uneven and trick you into assembling the furniture askewed
As long as you don't remove any of the "wood screw" elements (edit: that is, the screws used in the cam locks), they're perfectly ok to disassemble. They won't go as flat as the original box, but you can certainly transport them in pieces (with care).
I disagree out of principle; I've been in half a dozen rewrite projects during my career (currently in one too); while I will concede that sometimes it's a good call, it's also a really expensive one.
At least with a deep refactoring, if done right, the product continues to make money. In hindsight, I should've spent that 2.5 years at my previous job refactoring, optimizing and modernizing the existing PHP + Dojo codebase, instead of try to rewrite it in Go + React.
Sure, the API was a factor 100 faster, the UI was faster and more responsive, the whole thing was future-proof for the next decade. But after 2.5 years I was only about 20-30% there in terms of feature parity. The existing codebase was one guy over the span of 7-8 years. I asked for reinforcements but never got them, only after two years did they carefully start putting up ads on e.g. monsterboard. You can see why I called it quits.
My most recent lesson of IKEA is that quality has gone to shit. And prices are pretty high, all considered. Bought a couple new Hemnes dressers a few months back and they are just garbage compared to the older stuff. Material quality is same as usual, but the precision of manufacturing is gone. In the end, only one or two drawers actually open correctly. The rest bind up to varying degrees. I'm tempted to partially disassemble them and rebuild with my own hardware and glue in order to get tolerances that are adequate.
> Oddly, there were already provisions for these additional beams, leading me to believe the design was "simplified" on the way to manufacturing.
More likely is that an earlier version of the product did have those supporting beams. Not on the way to manufacturing, during manufacturing.
The typical IKEA experience is that the first 1-2 years of a product are built sturdier than later versions. They figure out ways to cut the cost of existing products. This hurts the consumer, because even if you hear "oh the Flybnort is very sturdy", that might no longer be true.
People like to complain about Ikea but is there any other furniture that's decent quality at a decent price available in the US? It seems unless you go super expensive everything else is basically crap that's still expensive. From what I have seen Ikea is by far the deal in the US.
To add: I have moved Ikea furniture quite a few times without many problems. With most furniture I add some brackets on the backside to make it more sturdy which makes moving much easier.
For quite a few thousand dollars, I bought a preconstructed lacquer bedroom set from a pricey national furniture chain. The saleman said the bedroom set came with a 10 yr warranty. 4 years later, I moved to a new residence, right after which the bed frame developed a nasty squeak (you know when) that definately hadn't been operative before I moved.
I made a warranty claim to the national brand furniture company and was quickly educated as to the warranty fine-print terminating said warranty coverage at any address other than the one they delivered it to.
Moving is rough on furniture in ways too costly to address by design, these days.
I've never had a piece of ikea equipment where that applies, I'm typing this on my ikea desk from 2011, next to a 2x2 kallax and another 2x4 kallax that have moved 5 and 3 times respectively.
Well, kallax 2x4 is still a rather light piece of furniture and there's not much need to disassemble it. This need grows with size/weight - e.g. couches, large wardrobes (Pax) etc.
OTOH, I have a 4x4 Kallax that's barely been moved between the rooms couple times in the last few years, and it's already getting wobbly enough that I'm afraid to put much weight on it; it's another of my IKEA furniture pieces that'll end up reinforced with metal angle brackets.
Moving furniture is probably a difficult one to charge for, but a disposal fee might incentivize moving or selling second-hand/reuse. If it's gonna cost me £30 to move a Billy and £50 to dispose of it, I'm going to move it instead.
But mass manufacturing and the industrial revolution really and our current economic reality has warped things. It's easier for raw materials to be mined from the ground, processed in a factory, molded into a form, packaged, shipped across the ocean, put into a store, purchased by a vendor, and then resold to end consumer as part of a to-go meal in the form of a plastic fork, and then discarded by the consumer (me), than it is for me to bring a fork to the cafe and wash it and bring it home when I'm done.
IKEA furniture is so cheap that we'd have to actually charge more to dispose of it than its new price, for that to work. I'm not opposed to that in principle.
The real problem is, the people most likely to dispose of IKEA furniture are young millenial apartment dwellers who move every 2-4 years. Apartment buildings don't usually have a way to measure each resident's trash, so they usually just split the entire building's trash bill evenly among all the residents (the lease contracts actually specify that it will be done this way). In that scenario, if there are 100 people in the building, everyone including you just pays an incremental £0.50 instead of £50 for your trashed furniture. The result is lots of people trashing furniture.
The people living in houses don't move often, don't change furniture often, and usually tend to invest in higher quality furniture than IKEA.
> Another lesson of Ikea is that often you cannot move them from one home/apartment to another, because if you try to take it apart and then reassemble it, it's never the same.
If you just bought a massive oak board (the were nowhere cheaper and better that at IKEA around 2005) with two solid trestles, you should easily be able to move them 13 more times.
They do, you just gotta be a bit more creative, which will also save you money.
Pro-tip for desks: don't buy them in the office section, buy desk legs from there, but the desk top itself from the kitchen section. Solid wood, no frills, cheaper pricing, and you can get some esoteric configs you cannot get from the office section. The choice of materials and shapes is much larger too. Hell, I imagine you can even get some marble-like top workdesk this way (though you might want to consider rethinking the desk legs and get something sturdier, marble is quite heavy).
Around 2017, I wanted a long desk that could accomodate a workstation + area for printer/working on models/3D printing out of solid materials without breaking a bank. Going the approach I described above, I ended up spending under $200 total (and that's including tax) for a solid wood butcher's table quality workdesk that was long enough to accomodate 2 multi-monitor workstations very very comfortably (or 3 workstations, just a little bit less comfortably). Needed 6 desk legs for this one, but I eventually replaced the middle ones with a cheap Kallax storage piece (from IKEA as well).
If you have well defined components it is often reasonable to rewrite them. Rewriting an entire project is likely a mistake. I think the mistake is generally the size. If you lock up half of the team and have them rewrite for 2 years then you are likely going to have time. If you slice off components that can be rewritten by a few team members in a couple of weeks you can likely get a good quality result.
I much prefer a SWE culture that embraces iterative development, where "rewrites" and migrations are not feared and can be done safely and efficiently because care was taken during the design process to identify ontologies and system boundaries. Yes, the MVP takes a bit longer as a result.
If you don't iterate, and you push what is essentially v0.1.0 to production, you reinforce a culture where deleting code is sin and the concept of iteration ("rewriting") is foreign.
is there a way we can extend the metaphor here to cover this aspect of ikea furniture?
it's perfectly serviceable and functional, but every time you mention the name people will go out of their way to tell you it isn't, you're wrong, and when you grow up you'll spend 10x as much for the "real" version that does basically the same thing.
Can we extend the anecdote to make it more accurate and say the opposite: that is, it's fragile but every time you mention it on HN, you'll have 10+ replies saying they personally moved it 13 times between apartments all across NYC, uphill, through snow, both ways, and then still sold it to someone else for a good price?
Can we extend the anecdote and say that everyone has unique requirements, and a unique situation and experience, that may be broadly if inexactly grouped into a few general categories but we should all accept that there is no one single correct answer; instead there are a myriad of valid answers depending on context and we all have something to learn from each other?
Would love to, but that reeks of Big Design Up Front, and is too large to fit into a sprint anyway. It's not the 1980s, we don't think about what we do anymore.
To extend this via analogy to the software realm, a deep refactoring is problematic whereas OTOH a complete rewrite is a better idea.
Which has not borne borne out by industry experience.