The issue is mainly when moving between apartments/houses. All the shifting weight and jostling in the truck simply weakens things too much. It's also not meant to be disassembled, and the particle board easily gets really banged up because it's so soft. And all this is even when trying to protect it with covering pads. (And sadly, none of your tips are going to help either -- fasteners simply pull themselves out of the soft particle board, because the board itself is weaker than the fastener/glue.)

A Billy bookshelf or Kallax shelving unit will hopefully survive a single move, especially if you can tighten/glue things further after it's been moved. But once you're talking 2-3 moves, forget it.

For that reason, for young professionals who move apartments every couple years in their 20's, it often makes more sense to just leave/toss their IKEA shelves/cubbies/units, and buy new pieces for the new place. It isn't durable across moves.

(Obviously I'm talking about "classic" IKEA particle board flat-pack stuff. If you're buying a solid wood table or metal lamp from IKEA then it'll be fine, but that's not what most people are thinking about when they think of IKEA furniture.)

> fasteners simply pull themselves out of the soft particle board, because the board itself is weaker than the fastener

This is true for most furniture. High-quality solid wood is also weaker than a metal fastener.

I do have a couple of short shelves that I got used and moved 3-4 times that look to be screwed into the material (my memory isn't that great :/) and I'm guessing at one point had a nailed on back. I'm fairly sure it just worked for me to disassemble and reassemble without change and they are somehow stable without any cross bracing. The previous owner might have changed the screws.

I also have a pair of IKEA chairs that were quite unstable when I got them used and the issue turned out to be that the order of tightening screws made a huge difference. Luckily it was new enough that it was easy to find the manual on IKEA's site or I would never have figured it out. I think a number of items have tricks like that where you need to exactly follow the instructions or it doesn't work.

I tried removing the nails and it’s impossible. They’re very very very snug. Even punching the backplane out just breaks it and leaves the nails in place with a little piece of board around them. There isn’t enough space between the nail head and the board to slide a kitchen knife and when there is, is breaks the knive’s edge rather than moving the nail.

Very curious indeed to know what your method is.

What I guess I'm trying to say is that it's not IKEA problem, it's budget lines of IKEA products problem. At the lower price range it's hard to expect great durability.

A lot of wooden IKEA furniture sold in Europe is produced in Poland and there are many local knock-offs of IKEA products from other manufacturers. These are either cheaper and even less durable or more expensive but barely match IKEA's ease of assembly and quality of the components. I really don't think that durability is IKEA's greatest problem. ;)

Came here to say just that. Some products are virtually bullet-proof, while others start to show their age after a few months of regular use. For example, cheap melltorp tables can withstand a nuclear blast and even a few cross-country relocations, but anything from their Billy line is already half-way to a trash heap after unboxing. IMMV.

A lot of IKEA stuff I've bought involves one-way assembly -- pounding things together with a mallet. See the EKET cabinets for example. If you reverse it by naively prying them apart, it'll strip the wood.

Or take the backing to any BILLY bookshelf -- it's held in place with ~30 tiny nails. It's virtually impossible to pry the backing and nails off without destroying the backing in the process.

Etc. etc. Yes, some of the pieces can be disassembled, if the assembly consists entirely of cam locks, dowels and screws. But it's certainly not designed for it.

Anecdotally, I just moved apparently. The the last two years my Malm bed was fantastic. Never made a noise no matter what I did on the bed. I could lay, kneel, have my dog run zoomies on it, and it was great. Then I took it apart to move apartments and you would have thought a banshee lived in the joints. Sitting, touching, it didnt matter that thing howled. We tried a few online solutions before doing the ultimate solution: buying a new frame.

Anecdotal but we have several (Expedit, the old Kallax) and they have survived 4 moves, one quite a distance and they are used daily to hold media and in a living room, one was part of my desk for 4 years. They are still in great condition. I expected 2 years out of them and am coming up on 10.

The only exception was one poorly designed under-the-bed drawer (the front gradually falls off due to the impacts if you kick it closed).

If you disassemble it, it immediately starts feeling like you got what you paid for.

I wouldn't blame IKEA specifically, any chipboard furniture would be prone to this.

They sell lots of both. If you're buying a $10 coffee table, yes, it's going to be particle board.

I feel like people are missing the core of ikea: it's well priced, stylish furniture that you can move into your condo or apartment easily.

So some IKEA stuff is well priced, some isn't. Some is great value for the money, some definitely isn't. Some styles are plain ugly as fk to us, some they nail pretty well for the price. I think its called hit-and-miss situation.

Their kitchens are great value generally - not top notch by any means, but at given price even professionals tend to agree they are the best. If you want something better, prepare 2-3x the price. And since you never move kitchen, most complains mentioned before don't apply.

Almost all of it is MDF, not chipboard/particleboard.

Perhaps the epitome of Ikea's engineered lumber prowess is either their Kalax line or their Lack tables, which are built from fiberboard blocks held together by a plywood diaphragm and with a celular cardboard core.

That was the 4th move, where I had disassembled and reassembled it each time. One of those moves was across the country too.

I've assembled loads of IKEA furniture over the years and have only rarely had quality issues. IKEA uses a lot more solid wood these days than compressed particle board, and is thus not bad.

The only issue I've seen (which IKEA has attempted to remedy in its more recent iterations) is that the bottoms of some of the drawers in a chest of drawers will "bow" down under load.

I've had mass-produced furniture from major brands known for quality, I've had hand-made wood furniture from NC, I've had big-box store self-assembled furniture and I've had IKEA furniture. Hand-made furniture can't be beat, but IKEA really is second best in my experience.

A lot of other factory made furniture is built starting from some vestige of traditional joinery, and then cheapened until it hits a price point. The construction is appalling. I don't expect mortise and tenon face frames, but pocket screws would be a much better solution than a couple of pneumatic nails, which do nothing to stabilize the case and can't be driven back in when they pull out under racking forces. At that point, the whole frame has to come off, and since the rest of the piece is as cheaply built, it's anybody's guess whether it'll hold together long enough to put the face frame back on.

The thinness of veneers on the tops of things that look like solid wood is a crime too. Most pros do the bulk of their stripping chemically, which doesn't risk damaging the veneer, but you usually have to do at least a little sanding, and it doesn't take much to find out what lies beneath. The result is that you can refinish a piece once.

Just like in software (which was my first career), doing repair/maintenance can be a real eye-opener.

If you like the look of IKEA, it's generally a good compromise between cost and durability.

EDIT: I should probably add that, in fairness, IKEA stuff , at least the particleboard or honeycomb cardboard stuff, is completely unrefinishable. I haven't seen any of their solid wood stuff come in for repair, but I'd take my chances on that if somebody wanted to pay me to.

I don't know what you're talking about... all the "classic" IKEA items like the BILLY bookshelf, the KALLAX (now EXPEDIT) shelves, the LACK table, the MALM chests... they're all particle board and, yes, bad quality. (Which is OK since they're cheap, that's the whole point.)

Yes you've always also been able to buy solid wood stuff, like certain tables and chairs or more expensive items, but that stuff isn't replacing the classic particle-board pieces. It's not like IKEA's been moving to higher-quality stuff on the whole.

That's not true. The Billy line is a mix of particleboard and a MDF backboard/diaphragm, but the Kalax/Lack lines are composite panels built from fiberboard, plywood, and a cardboard cell core. And they are superb, specially given their price and also weight.

(Source: I just bought a whole bunch of cube-shelving from IKEA - Kallax is all over, but Expedit is nowhere to be found.)

Seriously it’s worth the added cost. You’ll all love it.

However, even their crap can be really rugged. I have this $5 side table that I've been dragging around for a decade now that just won't die.

- the cheapest possible one at like $5 - a pretty OK one at $20 - some really fancy ones with brass handles or sth at $40 or $80

The $5 products I bought fell apart, but the $20 ones are still perfectly fine.

So I guess depending on what everyone refers to as "typical IKEA stuff", their mileage might vary by a looong shot.

I don't know, is that a crazy, overly-activist idea?

Or, learn how to use the torque setting properly on your electric drill / screwdriver.

If you use a sledgehammer instead of a screwdriver, don't complain about furniture falling apart.

That's more a function of battery-powered drills being good enough and the stuff that requires a plug is designed to drill through concrete. My cordless Milwaukee has pressure-sensitive speed and a very granular torque setting, along with hammer drill and screw settings. My Ikea furniture is basically bulletproof.

Ikea, perhaps unsurprisingly, sells a cheap cordless driver ($20 US) with a torque limiter.

Perhaps this is unusual in the US but entry-level corded drills are readily available in the UK.

I don't know if this store is a good example, but this USA based store appears to stock a range of cheap corded drills:

https://www.lowes.com/pl/Drills-Drills-drivers-Power-tools-T...

I wonder if corded drills might be more common in the UK because your higher mains voltage means less current is required for a given power output. With conversion losses, you can't realistically pull more than a horsepower out of a typical 120V/10A circuit without risking a breaker trip, even if there's nothing else connected to the circuit. That makes a corded tool potentially much more of a pain to use than a battery-powered one, so even if the corded version would otherwise be much more cost-efficient, it still may be a tougher sell in the US.

I've heard the same power limitation described as a reason why electric kettles basically don't exist here, although since kitchen circuits are typically rated for higher current than most others, I suspect the absence of good electric kettles may have more to do with steeped tea having been displaced by drip coffee in Americans' morning cups.

I never realised that, but it makes sense. Canadians don't use electric kettles either and they like their tea! When I lived in Canada everyone seemed to have a stovetop whistling kettle.

Looking at my Australian-designed Chinese-built UK kettle, it's rated at "2760-3000W", which is far more than can be drawn from a standard US 120V outlet.

I wonder if that's also why I've seen almost no electric/induction cooktops in American media even though from my Central European POV induction tops are safer, easier to regulate etc. than gas cooktops.

As for not seeing them in the media, that is likely because electric cooktops don't make for good video. The pop of a nice blue flame is much more interesting. Additionally, most high end kitchen appliances are gas since gas is preferred by most professional kitchens.

A typical 120V circuit in the US is either 15A or 20A. Where are you finding 10A circuits?

You can get enough torque to break your wrist with 10 amps at 120v.

It gave me some idea of what things were worth at the pawn shop.

Everyone should have a basic toolbox that includes a cordless drill.

Corded drills are just _drills_. Cordless drills are typically drill / drivers.

Much like electrical circuits, it's not really that useful to have a limiter when you don't know what to limit it to.

Instead you start low and increase the setting one click at a time until the screw is seated properly, then use that setting for the rest of the screws.

(The torque setting is the numbered collar behind the chuck on your driver, if it has one. It won't be calibrated to anything, but lower numbers mean less torque applied to the fastener before the driver stops turning it.)

A low torque setting vastly reduces the hazard of splitting the MDF, or chewing up the bolt's drive socket, if you're a little careless on the trigger. Then you can hand-finish with a regular driver.

I'd hesitate to use a thread locker on Ikea bolts. They're cheaply made and very mild, so it's hard enough to get them out without stripping the drive as it is; there's no way you're going to break Loctite and not end up needing to grab a bolt head with vise grips. (And that's if you break the Loctite before the drive strips. I wouldn't count on that.) At most, I'd say wait until you know there's a problem with a fastener backing out before you start thinking about gooping it up with something, and even then probably start with something less aggressive than even blue Loctite - a tiny dab of superglue, maybe.

That said, a benefit to the lack(heh) of quality is how light everything is. I do a lot of projects that require using my entire living space. If it wasn't so easy to just shove the furniture out of the way, I'd have that much more inertia between me and doing what I want.

Sadly nothing can help with the problem of MDF getting chipped and gouged easily when you move house.

Was cheap as hell and supported heavy books and CRT TV for thirty years. The durability being too low wasn't the problem.

Maybe if you're in a refurbished hundred year old house and it deserves some dignified antiques sure, but for the rest of us IKEA is just fine. We even have a 15 year old very cheap Lack table in the corner.

Speak for yourself. I just finished a long distance move, and I absolutely took all of my Ikea furniture apart.

I'm on about year 3 of my current set of Ikea furniture, and so far it's all holding up fine. I pretty much just followed the directions, and used a power drill (with appropriate torque settings) for pretty much everything.

It seems very plausible to me that there was plenty of crappy (probably homemade) furniture that wasn't any better than Ikea historically. Heirloom quality furniture takes real skill, time and materials to make. I can't imagine that the average pre-Ikea family would have been able to afford for all of their furniture to be of that quality. Not being any kind of historian, I have no idea how they filled that gap.

The problem is that people by and large don't want solid and reliable. They want a wardrobe with a full-size mirror and soft close drawers, not grandma's hand-me-down mahogany wardrobe that's built like a brick shihouse.

This thread is also full of people complaining about IKEA products not holding up to moves, but I bet most of them would change their tune if they had to move a house full of solid wood furniture.

That stuff is heavy. You can buy an old wardrobe that will barely dent when hit with a sledgehammer, but the labor cost of moving it is so high that it can be cheaper nowadays to scrap it and buy a new one from IKEA.

I'm reminded of the idea of "mechanic's feel" from "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's when you develop a sense for tightening a screw or bolt for snugness without destroying the threads, the head or the material. It's hard to do that with an electric driver in the way. (one exception might be the gyro drivers)

And with respect to wood glue - I think it's worth the effort to add it to the mix with the non-metal furniture. Not only does it make the furniture more solid feeling, it also helps prevent the screws from loosening.

Maybe we will be able to recycle it. That would be pretty nice.

https://www.btod.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ikea-id...

Good luck breaking the steel beam bed frame :)

Ikea furniture is not wood it's crap particleboards, cheap plastic, etc. - repairing that looks terrible. Their paint quality is crap as well - I bought a work desk that would scratch from moving a monitor on it and has wear marks from resting my hands. Same problem with kitchen table in a rental apartment - got scratched up from regular use and no way to repair it. Hinges on sliding doors would never stop correctly and scratch up the other door, loose/flimsy feeling mechanism in the first place.

I do have their standing desk - it fit the home office space perfectly and it was the only good delivery option during corona lockdown - I'm happy with that so far. In general IKEA is my least favourite furniture option but sometimes they are the most practical solution.

My kitchen table is from Ikea, it's solid wood. My Poang chair from Ikea came with a 10 year guarantee and I expect it to last longer than that. This idea that everything that comes out of Ikea is barely going to make it home is nonsense.

Of course if you buy a side table for £6 then you can't expect it to last long. That isn't representative of the whole though.

IKEA is like McDonald's of furniture, there's a place for it, but like the McDonald's fancy burger options if you're going for that you'll have significantly better options for a bit more money

Only if you value your time at 0. If you value your time at more than that, the time it takes to get a contractor and back and forth with him to agree on a design etc makes it more expensive, since with Ikea you pretty much opt into a generic solution of one-size-fits-all.

I agree it's not for everyone; though I wouldn't say it's the McDonalds of furniture – this would IMO be Poco (https://www.poco.de/); also I'm saying that as someone who doesn't eat McDonalds :-D

Depends a lot on the line. Eventually one figures it out.

I love the Hemnes line for example: the design suits my tastes and it's all 100% wood – from the smell of it I guess pine.

Regarding the paint job, that can be the case, though I wouldn't know as I normally get them in raw wood. Sometimes I overpaint them myself with a different color.

There are different tiers of furniture at IKEA. Cheap lines made of particle board. More pricey ones made of good quality solid wood. Middle priced stuff that's somewhere in between.

Depends entirely on the quality of the welds!

An old rented flat had metal dining chairs. Eventually the welds on the back rests broke and they started popping off. Nothing I can do about that, as much as I would like an excuse to buy a tig welder...

My parents have wooden furniture which has been in the family for 100+ years and repaired many times.

And I'm working on a desk that I picked up 15 years ago and it's still in great condition even after daily use.

With IKEA you get what you pay for. If you want quality IKEA furniture, you can get it. But it won't be that cheap.

Simultaneously weak, heavy and extremely vulnerable to water damage, it's only advantage is that it's dimensionally accurate when new and amenable to automated cutting, milling and drilling at the factory. I guess it's good with laminate coatings as well.

Another thing about IKEA is that if you got an old house with wide baseboards and not-quite-square walls, floors and ceilings, it's hard to make stuff like cabinets, bookshelves and counters mount properly. IKEA appears to be optimized for modern construction.

Much better to just get high-quality plywood cabinets, you won't have to worry about destroying it by using normal tools. It's also lighter and you will swear less and be done sooner. Even better, hire a carpenter to install good stuff.

Realistically, for people that move around a lot having a very cheap option to fit each living space is just efficient. Particleboard is effectively a form of wood recycling so using it is surprisingly environmentally friendly even if doesn’t last very long. However, once you buy a place it’s time to get something that lasts.