Im leaving my grandkids a very cleanly optimized starter base in Factorio.
That’s very thoughtful.
That’s an amazing gift
Confirmation bias: all the shite furniture from 1800s has rotted to dust already
I think it’s survivorship bias, but yes
Sure. A lot has rotted away, but much modern furniture is designed with so much MDF and other manufactured wood products that aren’t resilient in the least. Moisture will destroy them, they take gashes super easy, and are soft wood.
I’d think the furniture our grandparents had would be more likely to have been solid wood.
That’s not to say there aren’t solid hardwood pieces being made today. But they are extremely expensive and are competing in a space with poor regulation of descriptions and all the flat pack Chinese imported stuff thats literally 10% of the price of good furniture that will last.
Solid hardwood furniture is a luxury.
Balsa is hardwood Yew is softwood
Yew is 16x stronger
I bought a modern well made dresser from some exotic wood, cost me roughly €900 amd it got damaged after moving but i haven’t taken the time to repair it as it’s only visual.
That thing is solid af, it has more hidden supports than it needs. I could probably park a car on top and it would withstand the weight. (Obv. i haven’t tested that lol)
We went shopping for a tv cabinet and 99% turned out to be particle board but they still had the audacity to charge between €1200 and €1800 euro’s.
Yea. It’s really bad looking for something online. They may be under the “solid wood” category for material, but they still are 90% particle board.
I prefer spending extra knowing that I’ll have something for decades and not have to replace it in a year or two. Fortunately for me, about 80% of my homes furniture is from Habitat for Humanity. They are fantastic for having a good selection of quality stuff for cheap. Some might need a little repair, but they tend to only accept decent stuff in the first place.
I saw a headline that Ikea was considering a rental program because there’s a cultural understanding that flat packed* furniture especially that made of veneered chipboard is disposable.
And yeah at least Ikea puts in some effort to make their furniture decent. Much of what you find at retailers is just chip board shit, bookcases that’ll collapse under the weight of actual books, etc.
My strategy is, I’m a woodworker. I’m slowly replacing anything cheap and crap in my life with oak, cherry and walnut.
*had to correct myself from saying flatpak there, Linux has me trained.
Ikea has a lot of chip board furniture but they also have some decent solid wood furniture for a good price.
It’s usually pine but still for the price it’s a decent quality furniture that could last for a good time in good condition.
I would agree that using solid wood is a step up from veneered particle board in terms of longevity and durability. But they still use the same joinery system, those pin-and-latch things plus unglued dowels as alignment pins. These do offer the ability to disassemble the furniture in the future but every time you lean on, bump into, or otherwise apply a racking load to the piece, all that force is going to get transferred to the tiny amount of wood fiber surrounding those screw threads holding those latch pins in place, and eventually they’ll start to loosen. They’re still not as solid as a good old fashioned glued mortise and tenon, dado or dovetail joint.
I just moved into a house a couple years ago. While I’m mostly getting used furniture, I’m slowly looking into making my own and learning to repair what’s out there.
I’m really bad at staining or painting. I never feel like what I do comes out even.
Stain can be really difficult, and the real shit of it is cheap woods like pine, poplar and birch that you’d likely want to stain are the worst at it, they tend to come out blotchy. My recommendation is maybe add some tint to the top coat to steer the color in a direction you want but generally pick a wood that is the color you want already.
Part of the problem with those antique pieces is that they’re a bitch to move.
Same with old appliances.
And old cars…
And old people
This is true. I’m getting close to 50 and I’m already a good 37% dust.
And old toys
Even sex toys?
I have a prehistoric dildo, it still works perfectly.
What do you mean, “just a rock”?
Too exhausted to grab images but…
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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.
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I mean, not anytime soon, but hopefully eventually.
Then you have until eventually to acquire a giant hand carved wardrobe to leave them.
I have some work to do…
Now, I’m not sure what you do for a living, but personally, as a software engineer, I know that most people in my career line usually end up as either carpenters or farmers as their career peak. I’m more partial to the farming branch myself, but if you go carpenter, you can leave your grandkids some fancy ass furniture.
Woodworker here, I’ve already built some things that will last longer than I will. Not so sure about “fancy ass” but they’re not particle board.
I’ve always thought woodworking would be a fun hobby. I expect to get into it one day.
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?
The only thing my kids will inherit from me is ADHD.
Here’s a picture of the furniture my grandparents left me:
My grandparents didn’t even update their will when my sister and I were born.
Neither did my grandparents. Likewise, my parents didn’t update their will when my children and nieces were born.
The attitude among all generations has been: your own kids inherit, and they distribute to their kids as they see fit.
I wasn’t in my grandparents wills, but I ended up with some of their furniture.
What’s a will?
If you actually have good parents, there is no need to. Unless you’re over 18 the money typically goes to your parents anyway.
A whole a house or just this room?
Anyway: Amazing.
All I got was the IKEA family card. Free coffee. Yeah.
Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!
I’m going to take a different view of this for people to consider:
My dad collected a lot of stuff. He wasn’t a hoarder because most of the stuff had value, but he had so many collections: Coins, stamps, cigarette cards, movie posters, movie memorabilia, LPs, CDs, DVDs, so many other things.
When he died, I had to deal with it. All of it. And I am not a material goods sort of person overall, so I didn’t want most of it. It took me years to sell off what I could. We couldn’t even sell off most of the DVDs, LPs and CDs. They ended up either given to friends or to thrift stores. I’m still dealing with it even though he died in 2016. Who wants a life-sized ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin (dog for scale)?
Did I make money from selling it off? Absolutely. It even helped when we needed some money. But it really wasn’t worth the near-decade of stress I’ve had to go through to deal with this stuff and there really is no end in sight.
And now my mom is in her 80s and she has a house full of antique furniture like this which, again, I have no interest in (and no room for at this point).
Do not make your kids deal with this stuff unless they really want to. I said I would deal with it because my mom is just not good at this stuff and my brother lives too far away, but if I would do it again, I would either hire someone to deal with it all for a percentage and wash my hands of the whole thing or tell my dad that he needs to sell it off before he dies.
Instead of having a few items from my dad to really treasure, I ended up with a bunch of shit I didn’t want to deal with and it makes the stuff I do want to keep, most of which wouldn’t be worth a huge amount anyway, have much less sentimental value to me.
i understand all that but i don’t know how big your dog is
She has a head relatively the same size of a life-size ceramic Charlie Chaplin bust.
Wow, that’s quite a knickknack to have around.
How often do you have to explain to visitors that it’s Charlie Chaplin and not that other guy?
Never because it’s in a box in the garage. I’ve never been a huge Chaplin fan like my dad was. He’s much better when he’s serious than when he’s trying to be funny. The “look up, Hannah” speech at the end of The Great Dictator is definitely one of the great movie speeches and I highly recommend anyone here who hasn’t seen the movie at least read it, but his “kick each other in the pants” style of comedy never appealed to me. I was much more into Keaton.
I will say that I picked through my mom’s old LP collection and sprang for a player so I could start listening to some of her classic albums. Now I periodically throw on some Springstein or Beetles because its right there and I can. I also picked up a few newer records - the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, Father John Misty - and listen to them, too.
No idea what I’m going to do with my mom’s grand piano. She keeps trying to off-load that on me and all I can tell her is “It literally will not fit in the house.”
My dad was not into rock music at all. His collection was mostly film soundtracks, classical music and popular music from the 1930s and 1940s.
I like all of those things, but not enough to save the LPs or CDs. I can stream or download any of the ones I really want to listen to and enjoy it just as much, but not have it take up room in my not especially large house.
You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs. Some of them were worth something, but most of them were worth pennies. The month I paid more to eBay than I did make any profits, I gave up.
This is just one part of the CD collection when it was still in their house. There were multiple other shelves.
I can’t find a picture of the LPs, but imagine a wall of them the size of 1.5 garage doors.
And this is just the music. This doesn’t begin to go into all the other stuff.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp. He had a huge collection of first-day covers he had been collecting for my whole life. It went for $400.
You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs
Oh yeah. You’ve got to weed out the good stuff from the bad. I took maybe 1-in-5 from my mom’s far smaller collection of LPs.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
The worst thing I ever did was buy my mom a printer. She would go through stacks of paper in a month, just printing out whatever she thought she wanted to remember on the internet and sticking it in filling cabinets. I refused to show her how to change out the toner at one point, and that’s largely staunched the flow of dead trees.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp.
Like all hobbies, you really need to find a community of other hobbyists before they’re worth anything at all. Even a super-rare stamp has no value unless its got an actual buyer. And how many people even still care if you’ve got a Civil War double-stamped limited edition whateverthefuck anymore? Unless you’re selling it straight to a museum, where are the buyers?
I do wonder whether I’ll live to see people with these giant Magic: The Gathering card collections claiming value at six-figures plus when WotC has long since gone bust and nobody plays the game anymore.
My wife’s cousin had a massive collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards- we’re talking like fill a suitcase massive- and they’re basically worthless. He gave them all to our nephew about 10 years ago. He’s 18 now so I have no idea what he’ll do with them.
There are services in the UK where they come and clear the house for free. They take the risk on the value of what is in there.
If cheap furniture made by compressing glue and sawdust together existed 100 years ago, I bet it would have sold well.
Same goes for shoes. Everyone’s wearing terrible plastic stuff nowadays.
People used to just not wear any shoes. The poorest were barefoot or wrapped their feet in rags.
I wonder why simple shoes (like a piece of wood and some cord) picked up in the East but not in the West.
They were picked up in the West as well, but not as well known probably because they weren’t viewed as fashionable. They’re called Pattens FYI
Patten (shoe) - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patten_(shoe)
Dutch are known for their wooden clogs, no?
Yes, but both that and the style linked in the other comment are more complex than the Japanese style sandals. They are just boards with some holes drilled and knotted cord put through the holes. Some have two other pieces of wood underneath them to raise them off the ground a bit (maybe they work better in mud?).
They look like something you could take an afternoon and make enough new ones for your whole family, if you’ve got some wooden planks and cord.
Clogs look like they’d each take a while to carve and would require more skill to craft.
Though I don’t know how common either of those were among the poorest of each region.
My grandparents deliberately saved up for the expensive oak furniture. It was meant to last the rest of their lives (which it did). They had a different mindset than me and you who want something nice looking that doesn’t burden the bank account too much
That and I didn’t want to buy solid oak furniture when I lived in apartments and had to move on a dime because the landlord wanted to jack up rent or pull something… Again.
Chipboard was one of those things invented twice simultaneously during WWII, as the Germans and Americans looked around for resources to exploit and noticed the massive amounts of sawdust they had piling up. Chipboard cabinetry and furniture starts to emerge in the 1950’s. Ikea was founded in 1943 and started selling furniture in 1948. So cheap particle board furniture existed ~80 years ago, and did indeed sell well.
People bought mail order houses, which I think confirms the popularity of lightweight and portable big purchase items.
The one on the left took 5 months to make by monks in Tibet slave camps brought to you by China. The one on the right was made in 437.23 seconds by a Tormak 7000 series CNC discombobulizer 2000.
Sounds like an appliance from The Sims.
Yeah but does the one on the left fit a rack server? I think not!
The one on the left can probably fit the very first rack server.
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.
One thing for sure, is way easier to carry
And dust
easier to use too
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
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.
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.
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
That does explain lasting only 3 years.
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.
Yeah, but i got my bedroom from them.
