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Why are most sofas so bad?

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Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#281

Post by Gigachad »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #269
dylan604 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality ain't cheap, and cheap ain't quality. In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything Anything decent doesn't really start until ~$1k, and anything in the $3k range you mentioned starts to become heirloom quality. As with anything, these are YMMV, but serves as a fast basis for my experience

> Quality ain't cheap, and cheap ain't quality. The problem here is, that expensive doesn't mean quality. Buying a cheap ikea piece and replacing it in a few years might still be a better choice than overpaying for an expensive piece, that's the same quality as ikea, but with a different tag on it (both 'brand tag' and 'price tag').

The ikea stuff also seems to be perfectly fine. Almost my entire apartment I ikea stuff and I’m yet to have anything fail. With some of the oldest bits being the Malm draws which are about 15 years old now and still perfectly fine.

Sure, if you move them around a lot or leave them in the sun they will degrade, but just using them as normal they seem to last way longer than you’d think.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#282

Post by kayodelycaon »

Aeolun wrote: post #240
vundercind wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don’t get the complaints about IKEA instructions. They have the best furniture-assembly directions I’ve seen. They have a lot in common with old LEGO set instructions. Maybe people who hate them didn’t do a bunch of that as a child?

I have a really hard time understanding people that don’t get how to assemble furniture of that kind in general. Instructions or no instructions, there’s only so many ways you can put a bunch of planks together.

I know these people. They aren’t stupid. Many of them just aren’t good at visualizing things they haven’t done or been shown before.

They may know X should go into Y but the task is so unfamiliar or counter to how they think that they hit their working memory limit before it makes sense to them.

Impatience just makes that worse.

IKEA’s instructions are extremely helpful in this case.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#283

Post by Gigachad »

munificent wrote: post #272
JohnFen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legitimately had no idea IKEA sold anything of real quality. TIL.

I think IKEA is sort of like the Toyota of furniture. It doesn't look amazing, but it's higher quality than the price would lead you to believe because they work very hard to design things economically.

It’s also engineered incredibly well. There are no weak points or flaws in the design. It feels like someone poured their heart and soul in to producing the absolute strongest and most practical item possible given the budget.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#284

Post by Gigachad »

Aeolun wrote: post #240
vundercind wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don’t get the complaints about IKEA instructions. They have the best furniture-assembly directions I’ve seen. They have a lot in common with old LEGO set instructions. Maybe people who hate them didn’t do a bunch of that as a child?

I have a really hard time understanding people that don’t get how to assemble furniture of that kind in general. Instructions or no instructions, there’s only so many ways you can put a bunch of planks together.

Probably poor spacial reasoning skills. Didn’t spend enough time playing with Lego or sticking wood blocks through shaped holes.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#285

Post by BonoboIO »

tonyarkles wrote: post #232
maxglute wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one wants durable from IKEA, shop by material. They have sheet steel and solid wood that will outlast any particle board. The steel is a little thin on the budget line and the wood is not very aesthetic for some tastes, but they usually have options that last or outperforms more expensive particle board furniture that are more complex due to aesthetics. Hell even plastic there is fine, so many cafes with shitty be…

The other thing you can do is glue-and-screw instead of just using the screws. I’ve had a bookshelf or two break due to the screws blowing out of the chipboard during a move. Using regular wood glue/PVA meant that that never happened again although it also means you can’t disassemble it. Disassembling is kind of overrated though, the screws don’t ever go in as tight the second time, especially after it’s been sitting…

Underrated trick for ikea furniture. Do not use the ikea nails, they are junk … use staples.

Much stronger, easier to remove and you can remove them without damaging the part like the back of PAX

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#286

Post by freddie_mercury »

arp242 wrote: post #184
tptacek wrote: post #149

This article echoes something I've learned since we moved into a larger house this past summer: don't buy new furniture.† We bought very nice leather couches a few years back (we have dogs, leather is the only option) and paid dearly for them. And they're great. (We looked carefully at the construction details before buying.) This summer, we had some rooms we cared a lot about and others we just needed to fill in som…

Few years ago I moved to another country and had to get rid of everything I had minus ~25kg. It's bloody hard to get rid of a lot of stuff. I had a great leather sofa, about 15-20 years old (inherited from my grandparents) still in great condition, but I couldn't get rid of it at any price and none of the charity shops took it because it was missing some fire hazard label (sigh...). Same with almost everything: I sol…

I've moved countries three times and that's been my experience each time.

What's more, actually selling stuff is often such a time consuming hassle (posting, dealing with replies, scheduling pick ups, dealing with flakes) that in a lot of cases you're better off just paying trash hauling service to just come pick it all up in a single go.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#287

Post by swayvil »

I dream of an inflatable couch. Bear with me. It could be well designed and high quality. And with a nice slipcover.

There is somebody who makes them but for the life of me I can't recall who.

They come with a built-in compressor.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#288

Post by Arrath »

angry_moose wrote: post #9

I've posted about our ~$2000 West Elm sofa that disintegrated within 2 years in a similar previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37393399 The whole thing is just stapled together OSB. I ripped the dust cover off and added 3 new frame stretchers made from 2x8 construction lumber (and tied other loose joints back together) and its done pretty well since then: https://imgur.com/a/bqlLgW3 (wish I'd gotten…

I'm considering doing exactly this kind of surgery on my couch, how hard was it to put the fabric cover back together?

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#289

Post by thfuran »

eightysixfour wrote: post #254
nerdponx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if it wasn't bad enough that most consumer goods have completely bifurcated into "junk" and "luxury", now it's hard to even tell which products fall into which category, because there is so much junk now being sold as luxury.

Luxury does not have to be premium or vice versa. Premium conveys quality, luxury conveys status.

Luxury implies comfort or quality.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#290

Post by MarkusWandel »

We got a couple of secondhand ex-living room sofas very cheap. IKEA. Full leather, looked nice and an absolute dream to sit and lie on, just exactly the right combination of firm and soft.

These were for the kid areas. They had reduced the previous (IKEA Ektorp) sofas to rubble over a couple of years. These new ones didn't last long at all. The suspension underneath the cushions is criss-crossed webbing in a softwood frame. Well you can imagine, a 90lb child jumping on that, the forces that develop. And then the frame breaks at the front. And there's nothing structural at the front of the sofa, just some 1/4" thick fiberboard, to anchor replacement frame material to so you can't really fix it.

Oh well. One of them now has solid plywood - very well fastened to what structural elements are available - so it's now very firm but the kids don't care. The other, I had the inspiration of mounting the plywood lower and putting another layer of cushioning in there (leftover seat cushions from the demolished Ektorp sofas). That's actually pretty good.

But without rambunctious kids, these sofas, which were already 10-15 years old, would have lasted quite a while longer. It's wizardly, the seating comfort they got out of such simple and cheap materials.

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