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IKEA-Oriented Development

taylor.town

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Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#91

Post by Gare »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
naet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 furnit…

> we made sure to screw all IKEA furniture to the wall

That's what the instructions tell you to do

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#92

Post by taberiand »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #88
notatoad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#93

Post by dheera »

fragmede wrote: post #64
dheera wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unfortunate reality for the environment is that IKEA furniture often costs less to trash it and buy new than to hire people to move it. It would be interesting if we could create a world economy in which moving something always costed less than manufacturing another instance of it.

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 fa…

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.

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#94

Post by filoleg »

majjam wrote: post #66
civilized wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My IKEA desk has survived 13 moves since 2005...

They dont build em like that any more (from wood).

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).

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#95

Post by philjohn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
naet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 furnit…

I mean, drawers and bookshelves should always be attached to the wall.

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#96

Post by TeMPOraL »

taberiand wrote: post #92
TeMPOraL wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

:).

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

Gare wrote: post #91
TeMPOraL wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 furnit…

> we made sure to screw all IKEA furniture to the wall That's what the instructions tell you to do

I'll check next time, because I've never noticed it, nor have I seen many people doing it.

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#98

Post by codetrotter »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
naet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 furnit…

> 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.

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#99

Post by wlesieutre »

naet wrote: post #29
euroderf wrote: post #6

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.

Re: IKEA-Oriented Development

#100

Post by adrian_b »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
naet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 furnit…

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.

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