Hacking IKEA Furniture

I probably don't understand what "fashionable" means, but I've always suspected that in order to be fashionable you have to give up your dignity and, ironically, your individuality.

It's like that (probably apocryphal) hipster story that was doing the rounds on the interwebs a few years ago. Angry with someone for having used an image of him to describe the stereotypical hipster. Only to then find out it wasn't a picture of him, he did look like the stereotype of a hipster and that there was nothing unique or individual about being like all the other affected "unique and individual".

What a horrific idea: to expend effort to stand out just for the sake of standing out. How does one end up there without first having lost a big chunk of individuality?

generally for every thing (bed, chair, bookshelf, coffee table, etc) there's a solid wood version

You make it sound like IKEA isn't fit for second hand use. I live in Scandinavia, the classifieds and the second hand furniture shops that do not specifically cater to the vintage crowd, says otherwise. There's a lot of IKEA furniture on the second hand market. Of course it gets second hand use. And if you are in a university city, you can bet that a lot of the furniture students have is on its third or fourth owner.

As for "ecological lifecycle", that's a more complex question than can be expressed in a few paragraphs because one needs to understand what timber is and where it comes from. As well as how it is used.

If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat, since the deforestation that actually matters, that of untouched virgin forest, is mostly to produce what ends up on your plate. Mostly beef, but also oil crops etc. The timber in your furniture comes from managed forests. Essentially crops. Of which there is no shortage.

However, there is a shortage of virgin forest. In Europe genuinely untouched forest, which is the kind that matters for biodiversity, is somewhere in the region of 2%. Which is why most Europeans will never see actual virgin forest during their lifetime. The thing they think of as forest is managed plantation with low biological diversity.

(The situation in the US isn't nearly as bad as in Europe. Alaska has mostly virgin forest for instance)

This is why countering deforestation isn't about "just planting trees". If it were about that we wouldn't have a problem because we plant orders of magnitude more trees than we fell in virgin forests. In the US alone about 1.2-1.3 billion seedlings are planted yearly during the planting season. To maintain an equilibrium.

Where I live he amount timber, by volume, has tripled in the past century. The problem isn't that we have too few trees - it is that we are behind on managing their age distribution. 40-45% of the forest where I live is harvest ready. About 10-15% of it is overdue.

(And we haven't even touched on recycling, and the amount of recycled materials found in the products of IKEA and others. Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood)

> There's a lot of IKEA furniture on the second hand market.

Anecdata: about half of secondhand IKEA-like furniture i get my hands on is somewhat severely damaged, and about a quarter overall i just throw away. Stats may be different elsewhere, but even talking to other local skippers and ressourcerie workers here in France, the common knowledge is that unless you get it in perfect mint condition, there's no point or resale value in chipboard/plywood furniture.

(this is not just a furniture problem, about 90% of electronics entering a ressourcerie will just end up in the recycling bin because repairing it takes skills, time and resources for very little commercial resale value)

> If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat

Good point, i'm not claiming simply stopping to buy IKEA-like products is going to save the planet. There's much much more to do.

> The problem isn't that we have too few trees

I agree overall, although it's often locally wrong: industrial agriculture is displacing a lot of forests and woods which negatively affects the water cycle (a different issue). Here in France deforestation is a real problem and simply keeping concentrated patches of mono-species woods (that you blank cut every X years) isn't helping nature thrive.

> Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood

I have conflicting feelings about it. I'm of course very much pro-recycling as a concept. However the current implementation of taking chemical-filled products and chemical-bathing them to produce more chemical-filled products (eg. plastics or chipboard) doesn't exactly sound eco-friendly.

In fact, i'm not even romantic about massive wood furniture. I've more than once almost broke my back on them in staircases, and the price new is crazy. I'd say half of my furniture is massive and half is Ikea/Conforama: 0% has been bought from the original store, 50% has been bought secondhand (the rest found/donated) and no single item cost more than 20€. I don't have bad feelings for my Ikea-style furniture (love my 2 Ikea GNEDBY for the books), i just don't think this industrial production and throwaway-furniture culture is something we should aim for as a society because it's not sustainable.

I thank you for the gracious compliment, that my writing style reminds of you of the technological marvel of modern machine learning, but I assure you the brogue and tempo were refined long before we had the bits at scale required to match the power of my mind.