IKEA furniture is great for small adjustments to fit your needs. Not costing a fortune also makes it easier to experiment with it.
Since they're so common, it's easy to find CAD drawings for most of them.
I did a small hack/conversion on a Billy closet to hide some pipes in our apartment.
https://vanderwalt.de/blog/customizing-ikea-billy-to-hide-pi...
My mind immediately went: I’m sure there is some German law or ordinance or regulation against hiding your Gaszähler. This surely goes against die Niederdruckanschlussverordnung.
Now that you have published this online, police will visit you to remove the Billy!
I really hope not! But it does look much better this way, it was an eyesore. And the regular heizung guys didnt complain when they saw it like this, so im assuming all is well
As long as you can easily slide it out of the way and it isn't fixed to the wall, it wouldn't be a problem for anyone who needs to service it. Therefore, it would not be against regulations, because all regulations in Germany are logical
Whenever I looked at using IKEA stuff to hack or incorporate into a larger build, the cost, effort, and quality never seemed worth it to me.
I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.
If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.
A butcher block desk with 4x4s for legs is pretty simple and forgiving. Matching the quality of appearance of a lot of other IKEA furniture would require quite a bit more skill and tools.
Like a Kallax, unless you're a real wizard you couldn't cobble one of those together without a lot of skill.
I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.
I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.
If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
IKEA furniture can hold up very well if you follow the instructions precisely and don't disassemble them (in most cases).
We have furniture from IKEA that we bought at least five years ago that still functions great. A mattress we got from them is absolutely stellar with a memory foam topper; all of our guests love it. I think our coffee table is ten years old now.
However, everything goes to hell once you try to take it apart. This is why our mattresses are not on IKEA bed frames. Taking them apart has ALWAYS weakened them significantly. (We use Thuma Japanese joinery bed frames, which are AMAZING for moving and very high quality).
Which is kind of moot when you're talking about high-quality furniture, as they are usually single pieces as well.
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.
For functional sturdy furniture like this, if you are OK with the look, you can make the base/frame from aluminium 80/20 extrusions (the kind with t-slots and all kinds of standard brackets etc for fastening them together). Misumi has a simple CAD interface to design a complete unit, and this generates a single part number for you to purchase everything cut to length, with holes if needed, and all required accessories and fasteners to assemble it. You can easily add a wooden countertop or shelves if desired.
It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).
Creating luxury closets from the modest PAX platform is my favorite Ikea hack read (currently working on such project). And by the way, the non-nerds take it to a different level.
As a Kallax enjoyer I used to hate that I was limited to ~32cm width and height, it took me years to realize that I can just remove some of the dividers and make the nooks either wider or taller if I rotate (!) the shelf. It obviously affects load carrying capacity, but it's still plenty strong if you are smart about it.
I was thinking along the lines of Ikea-style furniture from scratch. Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.
I've long been considering this idea as I make a lot of my own cabinetry, and would love to get automated cutting and drilling lists depending on if I'll use screws or dowel pins or some nice wooden joints.
In general, you always start with outside dimensions, board thickness, having a kick plate or not (eg. when you make it wheeled), will you chamfer/round the edges and then the rest is simple calculation. You add internal shelve/drawer dimensions and it can consider those too.
I had some scripts that worked with an older version of FreeCAD and printed the cutting list to a CSV, but it still was not the perfect solution.
Interestingly, local chipboard/MDF shops here in Serbia would do that as a service for you on their CNC machines (at additional cost, obviously :)).
> Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.
Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.
> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.
In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.
But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).
I think you’re right, and there’s definitely potential for disruption of kitchen and also wardrobe offerings in some countries.
(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)
If you're interested in that I would search for a maker space or hacker space in your area. They usually have tools (like a CNC router) that would be far too expensive for an individual to buy and they let the public use them after taking a short class and paying a membership fee.
Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.
Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.
People like to complain about it not being solid wood but the furniture from Ikea, such as Lack and Kallax is fit for purpose and remains a low price despite the cost of wood going up a lot. And what you can get at a similar price point from Wal-Mart in North America, or Conforama in Europe, is much much worse quality. Especially the veneer which holds up from Ikea but is more like wallpaper if you spend the same price somewhere else.
It depends on your comparison; a Lack table is maybe an extreme example.
I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)
Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.
yeah, those cardboard tables.. I had to glue in 2-4 (5 by 10 cm) stringers and refix legs to them for it to hold a measly epson c8600 and even then it stands on wooden planks to distribute the load.
ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.
I love KALLAX the most of all IKEA series. Sturdy as heck, can take a lot of weight, extremely versatile and durable. I've used it as a bookshelf, for putting boxes away, as a wardrobe organizer, you name it. Oh and the price is right. Nothing else comes close.
A non-hack I learned about yesterday. I was taking apart an IKEA dining room table. The screws and bolts were obvious, but the top would not separate from the frame.
After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.
I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.
I used to spend hours pouring over the https://ikeahackers.net/ site - but never actually hacked much of our furniture (no more than adjusting the height, or changing handles/worktops).
As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.
Re: the slight wobble, you should be able to find some inexpensive thin-sheet backing board at a hardware store. Use small ribbed tacking nails or glue around the edges to attach it at the back, and it should help stabilize and prevent racking.
The low cost makes it perfect for diy as for an amateur you know that you have the safety to be able to easily buy a new unit if you screw up.
Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.
In 2014, IKEA made headlines when its legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jules Yap, the founder of IKEA Hackers, demanding that she hand over the domain name. Good to see the site still online, after the PR department took note that legal teams were not-only filing useful claims.
Ever since then, I avoid sharing pictures of IKEA furniture. Like Mattel, suing barbie blogs of children. If I did not design it, I won't share a picture of it. Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
> Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
? In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place).
In the there's the assumption you can photograph anything without a 'do not photo, military dogs' etc.
Never heard of a non-publishable building. Even gchq can be photo's.
IKEA furniture is great for small adjustments to fit your needs. Not costing a fortune also makes it easier to experiment with it. Since they're so common, it's easy to find CAD drawings for most of them. I did a small hack/conversion on a Billy closet to hide some pipes in our apartment. https://vanderwalt.de/blog/customizing-ikea-billy-to-hide-pi...
My mind immediately went: I’m sure there is some German law or ordinance or regulation against hiding your Gaszähler. This surely goes against die Niederdruckanschlussverordnung.
Now that you have published this online, police will visit you to remove the Billy!
Perhaps I am too pessimistic with German laws.
PS: It looks much better this way.
I really hope not! But it does look much better this way, it was an eyesore. And the regular heizung guys didnt complain when they saw it like this, so im assuming all is well
As long as you can easily slide it out of the way and it isn't fixed to the wall, it wouldn't be a problem for anyone who needs to service it. Therefore, it would not be against regulations, because all regulations in Germany are logical
Good to know! It slides in/out like a puzzle, so should be fine then.
This look lovely and probably felt extremely satisfying once everything was said and done.
Thanks!
I've been pretty disappointed with "medium quality" slightly more expensive furniture from places like west elm and pottery barn.
Now I will either get older recycled furniture for quality or pieces from IKEA for cost.
I’ve just put an IKEA kitchen in. I had to do a very similar modification to fit the plumbing in.
Whenever I looked at using IKEA stuff to hack or incorporate into a larger build, the cost, effort, and quality never seemed worth it to me.
I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.
If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.
A butcher block desk with 4x4s for legs is pretty simple and forgiving. Matching the quality of appearance of a lot of other IKEA furniture would require quite a bit more skill and tools.
Like a Kallax, unless you're a real wizard you couldn't cobble one of those together without a lot of skill.
There are tons of websites like this: https://ikeahackers.net/
I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.
I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.
If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.
IKEA furniture can hold up very well if you follow the instructions precisely and don't disassemble them (in most cases).
We have furniture from IKEA that we bought at least five years ago that still functions great. A mattress we got from them is absolutely stellar with a memory foam topper; all of our guests love it. I think our coffee table is ten years old now.
However, everything goes to hell once you try to take it apart. This is why our mattresses are not on IKEA bed frames. Taking them apart has ALWAYS weakened them significantly. (We use Thuma Japanese joinery bed frames, which are AMAZING for moving and very high quality).
Which is kind of moot when you're talking about high-quality furniture, as they are usually single pieces as well.
> it is unlikely to survive several moves
I have several pieces that have survived 3-4 moves. The trick is when assembling, use wood glue with any dowels. On their own, these dowels only have friction to hold them in place, and over time, the surface of the area where they are inserted compresses, reducing friction. Hence you get that typical side to side sway. The glue mitigates this problem.
Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione Some 52 years ago.
https://archiyou.com/articles/enzo-mari-s-autoprogettazione-...
Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.
For functional sturdy furniture like this, if you are OK with the look, you can make the base/frame from aluminium 80/20 extrusions (the kind with t-slots and all kinds of standard brackets etc for fastening them together). Misumi has a simple CAD interface to design a complete unit, and this generates a single part number for you to purchase everything cut to length, with holes if needed, and all required accessories and fasteners to assemble it. You can easily add a wooden countertop or shelves if desired.
It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).
Creating luxury closets from the modest PAX platform is my favorite Ikea hack read (currently working on such project). And by the way, the non-nerds take it to a different level.
https://erinkestenbaum.com/2018/12/12/hacking-the-ikea-pax-i...
As a Kallax enjoyer I used to hate that I was limited to ~32cm width and height, it took me years to realize that I can just remove some of the dividers and make the nooks either wider or taller if I rotate (!) the shelf. It obviously affects load carrying capacity, but it's still plenty strong if you are smart about it.
I was thinking along the lines of Ikea-style furniture from scratch. Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.
I've long been considering this idea as I make a lot of my own cabinetry, and would love to get automated cutting and drilling lists depending on if I'll use screws or dowel pins or some nice wooden joints.
In general, you always start with outside dimensions, board thickness, having a kick plate or not (eg. when you make it wheeled), will you chamfer/round the edges and then the rest is simple calculation. You add internal shelve/drawer dimensions and it can consider those too.
I had some scripts that worked with an older version of FreeCAD and printed the cutting list to a CSV, but it still was not the perfect solution.
Interestingly, local chipboard/MDF shops here in Serbia would do that as a service for you on their CNC machines (at additional cost, obviously :)).
> Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.
Do you mean local woodshop? CNCs that fit a full sheet-good are very large and expensive and not at your typical hardware store. Especially once they can load and unload, change bits.
Sheet-good sized CNC's are mostly for batch jobs do not really make sense economically for one off designs. You'd be better off with just panel and cabinet saws.
> How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.
This is most modern cabinetry businesses now internally. Some companies have started offering direct to consumer products, but most are still b2b.
In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
But even if you were to get the wood cut and prepared perfectly, there's still a lot of skill to turn that into nice desk for example, with good joinery, veneer on exposed end grain, etc and a lot that can go wrong, and you are likely to end up with a worse result than a mass produced desk for a much higher price. This type of manufacturing can't compete at all with the cost optimizations that Ikea can do. So where you see B2C in this space is built-in furniture like for kitchens. This has a limited design space so a lot of the parts are standardized, and the design can be constrained to not have the end user work on details like exposed end grain. I guess this doesn't really have an alternative mass-produced option, so the price comparison is to hiring a contractor, so it makes sense as an offering.
But it's evidently hard to get right. If you go to an Ikea that sells returned goods, that section is filled with kitchen countertops cut to the wrong length (good source of cheap wood for projects by the way).
I think you’re right, and there’s definitely potential for disruption of kitchen and also wardrobe offerings in some countries.
(I say some countries as IME there’s a huge difference in existing competition between countries. For example, I found that the kitchen options in Germany were hugely restricted vs. what I was used to in the UK.)
If you're interested in that I would search for a maker space or hacker space in your area. They usually have tools (like a CNC router) that would be far too expensive for an individual to buy and they let the public use them after taking a short class and paying a membership fee.
That would be very expensive compared to ikea.
Look at the very popular Lack table, it's made from cardboard hexagons with four pieces of wood-like thing in the corners to hold the legs. You can't make that yourself for cheap, and just the material cost in eg. wood, would be more expensive than the full table in ikea.
Otherwise, there are many youtube channels specializing in woodworking where you can learn all the basics to design your own furniture, but it won't be cheap.
People like to complain about it not being solid wood but the furniture from Ikea, such as Lack and Kallax is fit for purpose and remains a low price despite the cost of wood going up a lot. And what you can get at a similar price point from Wal-Mart in North America, or Conforama in Europe, is much much worse quality. Especially the veneer which holds up from Ikea but is more like wallpaper if you spend the same price somewhere else.
Solid wood is also a nightmare to move.
It depends on your comparison; a Lack table is maybe an extreme example.
I say this because I’m currently working on a project to build a full kitchen’s worth of cabinet carcasses using good quality 19mm plywood, and I’m aiming for it to be cost neutral with Ikea’s kitchen cabinets, having sourced the plywood from a local DIY store. (Obviously ignoring the cost of my existing tools.)
Which is to say, if you could source plywood in volume (therefore cheaper per square meter) and amortise the cost of the CNC machine and other tools over time, I think it would be feasible to be close to cost competitive with IKEA‘s kitchens.
I applaud you and your project.
But CNC isn't the silver bullet. What I ended up with is 25mm glued wood for frames, 55mm for tops and 15mm plywood plus veneer for facades.
If you use 19mm for frames, you won't have enough strength for hinges, which would inevitably be abused.
If you use 19mm for tops, they will sag and vibrate. The best top I have is actually 55mm IKEA glued oak.
yeah, those cardboard tables.. I had to glue in 2-4 (5 by 10 cm) stringers and refix legs to them for it to hold a measly epson c8600 and even then it stands on wooden planks to distribute the load.
ikea is a great inspiration for making your own furniture and then a source for bearable spare parts.
I love KALLAX the most of all IKEA series. Sturdy as heck, can take a lot of weight, extremely versatile and durable. I've used it as a bookshelf, for putting boxes away, as a wardrobe organizer, you name it. Oh and the price is right. Nothing else comes close.
A non-hack I learned about yesterday. I was taking apart an IKEA dining room table. The screws and bolts were obvious, but the top would not separate from the frame.
After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.
I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.
I recently did my own hack that turned out great - it’s a drawer + desk hack. It takes some planning, but so satisfying when it works out:) https://www.reddit.com/r/ikeahacks/comments/1srj3g9/malm_m%C...
I used to spend hours pouring over the https://ikeahackers.net/ site - but never actually hacked much of our furniture (no more than adjusting the height, or changing handles/worktops).
As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.
Re: the slight wobble, you should be able to find some inexpensive thin-sheet backing board at a hardware store. Use small ribbed tacking nails or glue around the edges to attach it at the back, and it should help stabilize and prevent racking.
"Hacking" when used in the context of furniture actually means breaking it with an axe.
What’s the distinction between hacking, whacking, and chopping? And how can we incorporate these terms into tech?
Minimum Carpentry Protocol (MCP)
Love a good IKEA hack. Readily available, standardized, low-cost materials are a great platform to build creatively!
Build more real stuff, everyone.
I have this whole website dedicated to it bookmarked since a long time: https://ikeahackers.net/
The low cost makes it perfect for diy as for an amateur you know that you have the safety to be able to easily buy a new unit if you screw up.
Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.
There’s <https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack>
https://ikeahackers.net/
In 2014, IKEA made headlines when its legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jules Yap, the founder of IKEA Hackers, demanding that she hand over the domain name. Good to see the site still online, after the PR department took note that legal teams were not-only filing useful claims.
Ever since then, I avoid sharing pictures of IKEA furniture. Like Mattel, suing barbie blogs of children. If I did not design it, I won't share a picture of it. Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
> Even building architects will sometimes sue if you photograph the house.
? In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place). In the there's the assumption you can photograph anything without a 'do not photo, military dogs' etc. Never heard of a non-publishable building. Even gchq can be photo's.
Check the "Freedom of Panorama" article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama - lots of restrictions around the world.
> In the US there's the 1a - you can photograph anything you can see (from a public place).
Just because you can photograph it does not mean you can necessarily publish it. IP rights are a recognized exception to the 1a