Cyde Weys Musings

I can’t help it. Ikea is one of my guilty pleasures. I don’t particularly like shopping, and I would never consider shopping a leisurely activity. So while I do go to grocery stores and other places where I purchase essentials, I very rarely go to shopping just for the fun of it. Yet I absolutely love shopping at Ikea.

Maybe it’s the mix of awesome and useful things that are available for such cheap prices. Or maybe it’s the awesome but completely useless things that get me, like the poseable wooden doll sculptures and mass-produced oil paintings (made using actual paint). With the exception of stores catering exclusively to my hobbies (electronics stores, hobby gaming shops, Ham Radio Outlet, etc.), Ikea is the only store that leaves me with a feeling of wanting to buy a lot more than what I end up walking out with. I could easily furnish a whole house with goods from Ikea, and eat lunch and dinner there to boot.

I suppose what I like most at Ikea is the furniture. Furniture inhabits a very interesting realm in the kingdom of “things you need to buy”. Furniture is expensive, but things are really going to suck for you if you don’t have it — for instance, the most recent reason I went to Ikea is because I didn’t have a nightstand in my new place, and for someone who likes reading before going to bed, that is a big problem. And because furniture is big, heavy, and bulky, it’s not exactly something you want to buy online.

But the best aspect of Ikea furniture is that it comes in many precisely cut pieces of wood in a flatpack box along with a plastic baggie full of tools and fasteners. My greatest joy with Ikea is not in selecting the furniture in the store, but, perversely, in assembling it when I get home. I suppose to some boring people the fact that Ikea’s furniture doesn’t come assembled simply increases its cost by whatever one considers one’s time worth, but to me, putting together the furniture provides significant added value. I would, and this is not an exaggeration, gladly put together Ikea furniture for someone else, for free.

When I was a kid, I would spend uncountable hours sitting in front of a pile of Legos on the family room floor building all manner of creative objects. As I grew older I stopped playing with Legos because it was no longer an “age-appropriate activity”, but trust me when I say that one of the best parts of having children has to be having an excuse to play with Legos again. In this context, my love of Ikea furniture begins to make sense. It’s like a Lego set for grown-ups, only better, because the material is real, the end result is useful, and it will last for many years. And the assembly instructions, with their parts lists, numbered steps, schematic symbols, and lack of written language, are eerily similar.

So don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the hour and a half I spent putting together that $50 3-drawer nightstand was the most fun I had that entire week. I really got into it, improving the plans in several regards by using better fasteners and applying wood glue to all wood-on-wood joints (would you believe the plans only used wooden pegs in such situations?!). I’d gladly buy a lot more furniture from Ikea, but alas, I don’t have any more space to put it in. So for now I’m in a holding pattern, anxiously looking forward to the next time I have a need to buy furniture. At least I already know where I’m going to get it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 18:30 and is filed under Personal. Keywords: Tags: furniture, Ikea, Legos, shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.