The woodworker is me — and I was wrong to disdain the Swedes.
A modern dating axiom declares, “Don’t marry or move in with someone until you’ve built Ikea furniture together.” The idea, of course, is that during the trials of assembling predrilled plates of painted MDF from the hushed forests of the Vikings, a man will likely discover something about his beloved — some flaw in her character — and vice versa. It’s a trite little apothegm, which should match beautifully with this Millennial writer’s general musings about Ikea’s cultural power. But just because these observations are well-worn doesn’t make them wrong.
As best I can reckon, the pursuit of liberty is why young people gravitate to the brand.
Consider a young Manhattanite Yale grad consulting for McKinsey. This lad’s $80 bookcase purchase may be the first decision he independently makes in his 23 years. Mom and Dad have ordered his existence since his memory can recollect, all in service of such material success. That same emotion of perceived freedom animates a Times editorial intern (Princeton) and a communications drone (Harvard), both of whom presume to be the next Amy Davidson Sorkin.
These three will puzzle over the manual labor before them — a trio of coifed and overeducated hominids in their 400-square-foot apartments attempting to construct cube organizers upon which their doomed succulent collections will reside. Once done, they’ll rush to their computers to tell the world what they accomplished with an Allen wrench and the better part of the weekend. The young man will reward himself with a Carhartt jacket to show solidarity with the working class.
While I poke fun at my betters, there’s raw goodness in a young person’s delight when successfully engaging in spatial-reasoning exercises. It’s a skill that is all but foreign to white-collar occupations, except for maybe engineering. If a young man isn’t brought up living alongside a stack of Haynes car-repair tomes to reference in the garage, the last time he’s interacted with visual instructions was when assembling Lego Bionicle sets in fifth grade.
Assembly begets a sense of ownership, and I doubt it’s an accident that today’s woodworking renaissance coincides with Ikea’s boom in popularity. Indeed, the scent of Ikea’s veneered lumber is still intoxicating to a nose that works with cedar and oak — there’s real tree meat in those prefabricated sheets, even if it’s only chips and chunks glued together into a homogeneous whole. As with any other hobby, trying a hand at its simplest form can lead to an interest in mastery. A young city-dweller isn’t ready for a Delta sliding miter saw and a Grizzly dust-collection system — and his neighbors are probably glad that’s the case. But working through the basics of furniture assembly reveals the component parts. For those accustomed to everything being delivered to them as a whole, there’s value in grappling with deconstructed materials.
This is my long-winded way of admitting that I’m just a bit late to the Ikea party. A woodworking enthusiast of sorts, I had avoided (rather sniffily) the Ikea brand as cheap junk until last week, when I purchased and assembled a pair of bookshelves and office cabinets. Now I understand the incredible value for money the Swedish miracle offers. To re-create the Ikea items, one would have had to spend hundreds of dollars more on raw materials and dozens of hours on labor.
Pricing out the birch plywood commonly used for similar projects makes a man appreciate the economies of scale in Ikea’s operation. Unless one undertakes a large-scale project where jigs can reduce build times through repeatable cuts, I don’t see a practical reason to make bespoke cabinetry when Ikea is this well-engineered and inexpensive.
So, for under $500 and six hours of work, there stood bookshelves for my wife’s scrapbooks and comic-book collection (DC, exclusively; emphasis on the Robins) and two cabinets upon which I placed a six-foot butcher block for use as a writing desk. Thanks to the pre-drilled holes, the decent hardware and fittings included, and the liberal application of a Milwaukee M12 FUEL impact driver (a tool without equal), everything but my back and haunches felt good.
A fully operational writing station. (Luther Abel)
At risk of sounding like the lovely lady who reviewed her local Olive Garden, I’ve arrived on the bandwagon at last. I get it now. Ikea is an entry to real furniture and cohesive design language. Better-engineered than Amazon equivalents, it’s serviceable and able to be disassembled — an important trait for the possessions of an-oft moving young person. Still, the brand has its limitations. These cabinets will not age particularly well. They will not stand the abuses that custom hardwood furniture would endure for generations.
Ikea bridges the gap between landfill-grade and enduring — I wouldn’t drive a truck across that bridge, but it surpasses its market peers and offers a foundation for further furniture aspirations.
