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Why are most sofas so bad?

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Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#491

Post by makestuff »

nostromo wrote: post #242
hammock wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get made in the USA sofas with real hardwood, not rubber wood, which is fine, or worse, soft pine or particleboard or OSB) North Carolina was and is the center of solid wood furniture), and they still cost several to many thousands of dollars, and they will still last 100+ years with a couple reupholsterings or so, but most furniture comes from Asia now and is sold for 10x less, and is not worth reuphol…

Room and Board sells great sofas that are made in the US. We've been very happy with ours. It's made from solid wood and stuffed with real feather down. It's several years old now and has shown no signs of aging.

Yeah I have furniture from there mainly because it was the only showroom I could find that hide a wide selection + was mostly solid wood or veneered cabinet grade plywood.

The TV stand I bought from there shows no signs of warping a few years later and has had a 70 pound TV sitting on it the entire time.

The pricing was also pretty reasonable for solid walnut that was made in the USA.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#493

Post by Solvency »

m463 wrote: post #377
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.

the one that gets me (not furniture, but consumer good) is Yeti. they seem to be slightly better made, but for SO MUCH more money. They have huge stores devoted to their products. Are people really spending money, and that much, on coolers?

if you're a wealthy kid going to a beach bbq with your wealthy friends, yes. you signal to others your class through products like yeti.

replace your entire question with Apple and you'll see the answer as a pattern.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#494

Post by jbluepolarbear »

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…

Buying preowned furniture can save a lot of money. I bought a 4 piece sectional couch, in great condition, for $600. The set originally cost $4500.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#495

Post by sgc »

Symbiote wrote: post #415
teleforce wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoid particleboard like a plague if you can afford it, appparently most of IKEA products now made of these since they are widely being used in dirt cheap furniture construction. They melt like ice once in contact with water. Recently, just had to chopped off all four legs of a bookshelf then replaced them with metal legs. The bookshelf legs somehow got damaged in contact with accumulated air-cond water droplets.

Ikea has two or three price points for each product. The cheapest will be made from chipboard or even cardboard. The most expensive varies, it might be pine or even something better.

I bought their highest end leather couch with a fold out bed a couple years ago, due to time constraints. I was very unhappy to see it was made from chipboard. Of course their shelves and such you can see what you are buying, but I would not trust anything upholstered myself.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#496

Post by Solvency »

Gigachad wrote: post #283
munificent wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Found IKEA's CEO everybody.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#497

Post by Solvency »

munificent wrote: post #271
rsynnott wrote: post #34

I hear this a lot, but my fairly inexpensive IKEA sofa is about eight years old with no problems at all so far. EDIT: Actually, in general I've found that my IKEA furniture has done pretty well (basically everything in the house is IKEA) with the sole exception of a "Lack" coffee table, whose surface is kinda disintegrating after 8 years (I think it's basically made of cardboard with a veneer...). The name should per…

IKEA is a fascinating outlier in this discussion. At some point in my twenties, I decided it was time to upgrade from my broke college student IKEA lifestyle which to me meant West Elm. Every thing I got from West Elm was absolute garbage and none of it lasted more than a handful of years. Now I'm in the prime of my career and could move up to something actually nice if I really wanted to, like Design Within Reach (t…

So your snoring spouse: what happened after a year? Divorce? Did the snoring stop? How?

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#498

Post by martopix »

baud147258 wrote: post #455
gerdesj wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently visited Hong Kong. In a mall I spotted a shop called Sinéquanone (sic). It was flogging "French fashion", quite pricy "French fashion". Who knows, it might be French inspired. You can tell its authentic French thanks to the e acute and the trailing e! Sine qua non is Latin. To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder. Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or tradem…

> Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever! Here in France, the daftest I've seen is the Audi e-tron, with etron meaning turd... Though it's been out of common use, so Audi just left the name as is.

I remember an app that was a calculator where you could pen-in your calculations, so it was called Ink-ulator.

They later changed the name profusely apologizing to Italian users.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#499

Post by colloydi »

secretsatan wrote: post #411

The article goes on about the quality of manufacturing, which is very fair, but something that bugs me, and it seems to apply to cheap sofas as well as very expensive ones. Why are so many of them just plain uncomfortable? I'm looking for one I want right now, and I have to go around a furniture shop and try each out and I reckon, maybe 1/4 of them are suitable for a place you might enjoy sitting in. The high end fur…

I think this speaks to an important factor which is that most of us have little awareness of our posture and typical sofa designs reflect this. We want sofas to 'collapse' on rather than to sit comfortably. I became aware of this from learning the Alexander Technique to deal with another issue.

One hack you can perform on most sofas is to add some height to the rear legs using castors or wooden blocks or something. This tilts it forward a bit. Sitting back or reclining is fine in a dentist's chair because there's head support but it's no good on a sofa! There our head and spines need to be balanced.

Anyhow -- quality of materials and design are both important but the fact is that average bodily awareness is poor and this is a fundamental reason why our furniture is worse than it needs to be!

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#500

Post by jajko »

gruez wrote: post #392
neilv wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors. AirBnb should also be banned. And the people who profited off that startup, who must've known they were creating illegal hotels and destroying rental markets, should be hit with devastating fines, maybe also imprisoned.

>The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors. What's the issue with them buying houses as investments, as long as they're being rented out? If that's the case, their net effect on the housing supply is zero. >maybe also imprisoned. I find it extremely disturbing that people are effectively demanding for bill of attainder…

This is quite common trope here among young generation, feeling left out of property ownership like its some basic human right guaranteed by UN charter. Like previous generations were not left out of same/other stuff as well. That the post you respond to is not flagged tells you quite something... Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.

There are whole highly developed countries (higher than US for example in terms of personal freedom, ie Switzerland) who simply don't have home ownership as something usual and folks focus on actual quality aspects of living. Populations are consistently among the happiest (and healthiest) in the world.

Correlation != causation but maybe not joining property rat race (which was always the case, just tools were few and apart for most) has some significant benefits. And if its just about safe investing then we moved topic completely elsewhere, back to good ol' universal greed.

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