Ikea Effect: The Science of Cheap, Crappy Furniture

The stuff does not like to be wiggled. If you live in a trailer park and move your trailer to a new lovely park, your furniture will not survive. LOL

I would have disassembled it for transport, myself.

Feel free, but not me.

Since disassembly requires reassembly, had I know it was going to fall apart I would have left it in the dorm room and spent the $28 it would have cost for a new one, all boxed up nice and neat and easy to carry. Which, BTW, I ended up doing anyway.

Easier transport, no disassembly effort (think about the cardboard back with the 400 tiny nails holding it on), time saved, etc. If you've ever moved a college student out of dorm room at the end of a semester, you know that the last thing you want to do is waste time taking apart a cheap bookcase, packing it all up, carrying the pieces out and in, etc. No thanks! Not for $28.

Good thought but at least a few of those fancy fasteners would not go back together as well the second time as the first.

I had a particleboard (vinyl woodgrain) bookshelf unit that I got in 1979. It survived four moves by simply disassembling it and reassembling it. It's not rocket science.

Mine was purchased for my college apartment. And I was perfectly happy to disassemble it and pack it when moving myself out.

BTDT

It's also not 1979. I'll bet $ to donuts that even the cheapo particleboard bookcases were of a higher quality in 1979 than the $28 units they sell today.

I'm so proud of you. ;-)

Yeah but yeah but ;~) Back then it was quality compared to recent stuff.

Yeah, sure. You'd have taken a half hour to move something 3 miles and put it back together again? I'd have left it behind before doing all of that.

ME2

I actually do quite a bit of RTA furniture assembly for people in my area. FWIW, I'm very pleased when I find out it will be an IKEA product I'm going to assemble because their quality is significantly higher than other RTA furniture.

Most of the time, the "important" parts of the furniture are actually solid wood instead of termite vomit. And I'm assured that none of their hardware is going to snap in half under the weight of my screwdriver.

Sauder, Wayfair, any of the other brands out there are complete s**te, for the most part. I have to go in bringing extra hardware (HD/Lowes started carrying RTA parts) and have to avoid making sudden movements or loud noises, lest I spook the pieces and they fall apart under their own weight. :-)

But I can always count on IKEA for their (relative!) high quality when it comes to RTA furniture. Believe it or not, IKEA actually makes some high end stuff for their European markets. From what I hear, they started doing the boxed kits just for shipping to overseas markets.

It was ugly crap held together with cheap screws. I can't imagine that modern stuff has worse quality.

OK, you win.

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You would love putting together some of the RTA pieces that I have in my house. This 9' x 6' x 3' armoire is RTA:

This is one on the connectors that holds the top on (right hand image). You use any type of round pointed object to turn a barrel nut to draw the sections together.

The unit knocks down to 10(?) pieces not including the shelves. The biggest single pieces are the top and the base. Roughly 9 x 3 x 6". The rest are all about the size of one of the doors.

I have a 6' wide glass front book case, a dining room hutch, a curved glass china cabinet and a few other pieces from the same manufacturer. They were made by a German firm (whose name escapes me right now) back in the early

Yeah, those look pretty stout and definitely a different animal.

Or any screw in termite vomit.

It helps if you put a little white glue in each hole, and (after it dries) apply a hot iron to flatten the board.

The real key, is to use three screws where you'd use one for solid wood. Between screws and paint, flakeboard is a high-overhead way to save cash.

I have one downstairs that my mother (a great aficionado of cheap) bought me. It still holds up books but it had a lot of plastic trim that fell off very early and no hinge on it still functions. I have a few others that are of a similar nature but a step upmarket that are holding up fine. One of these days they all get replaced with built-ins. Of course I've been saying that for decades and so far nobody has provided me the necessary round tuit.