- Affordable prices for those living on modest incomes.
- Furniture packaged so that anyone with a crossover vehicle or a minivan can be his own delivery person.
- Encourages the DIY spirit in anyone who can identify an Allen wrench.
- The joy of Smaland. (Sorry, don't know how to make the circle over one of those letters.)
- Swedish meatballs. Enough said.
After you've stuffed yourself with meatballs, had a 60-minute reprieve from your young children begging for unique wall decorations, hauled your own packages from shelf to vehicle, put your credit card to good use, tested your ability to follow wordless directions with an amorphous and nongender-specific figure as your guide, and worked that Allen wrench for all it's worth, you've got your new furniture all set.
Wait a year or so. Maybe only a few months if you're talking about a piece of furniture often used (and thus abused in some ways) by children, and you may share our experience of this disadvantage:
- The crap falls apart.
To be fair, our living room couch, chair, shelving/entertainment unit, dining room table, side table, dining room chairs, kitchen chairs, computer cabinet, and bookshelf are all still standing. Minus a few scuffs here and there, they're perfectly functional for what they are. But, there's one area of IKEA furniture that I now want to advise anyone and everyone to avoid: chests of drawers.
Oh, the drama of the kids' dressers. The bottom panels never stay in place. The front panels pop off, pushing out of the hardware in a rare show of Swedish rebellion. The pieces of wood between drawers break easily, and the sliding mechanisms simply don't stay screwed in, despite the valiant efforts of the approximate 1-cm long screws.
Lovely hubby has been quite the trooper. The DIY spirit is strong in this one, I tell you. Each time a drawer would act up, he would go into his attic stash of spare wood and create new support systems. We ended up with fortified IKEA dressers, but it was no use. As soon as one drawer was new-and-improved, another would fall apart.
It became too much. I encouraged hubby to wave the white flag.
Thus began the quest to replace the large chest of drawers the boys shared. Know what we found out? If you want to buy real furniture made from actual wood, you've got to sell a child, apparently.
Oh, the frustration. We have a small space, which is why they were sharing a dresser, but it was large enough to hold a whole lot. (When it wasn't falling apart, that is.) New dressers from more expensive furniture stores were smaller and much more expensive than we were willing to spend on one single piece. Consignment stores were scoured. Craigslist was read, with increasing despair.
Then a new idea entered the arena. Funny thing, but hubby and I have been using his childhood furniture for our dressers since just about forever. It's a nice set, but it's a completely different wood and style than the bed set that we purchased before we got married. (That would be 13 years ago, just for the record.) Wouldn't it be a novel thing for two folks in the latter half of their 30s to have a matching bedroom set, a baker's dozen of years into their married life?
What more could we ask for than a bonafide grown-up bedroom set, peculiarly named for a 1980s movie character? Check out the Balboa- the set that will soon be fashionably crowding the bedroom of a blogger near you:
So, the boys' broken dresser has been replaced with hubby's childhood furniture, which is wonderfully perfect for two kids. Right now, our bedroom floor is littered with piles and boxes of clothing, books, and tchotchkes, awaiting their temporary move to Red's room right before the delivery and set up of our new set.
The set up that will be done by someone else, with nary an Allen wrench in sight.
Giddy over furniture made from actual wood,
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