Ikea. Does the very word make you cringe?
I understand. I’ve been there. When I moved off-campus in college, my friends and I thought Ikea was the greatest. Inexpensive. Sleek. Disposable.
Sure, the putting-it-together thing was kind of a hassle, but a few friends, an Allen wrench, and a six-pack made it kind of fun. It was our first foray into furnishing our own spaces, and it was an adventure, if a modest one. That Ikea furniture graduated with us and moved from our group houses to our first apartments across the country, nicked, dented and scraped, but otherwise totally serviceable.
Then we got jobs. Then we got better jobs, and we started to make a little money. Some of us moved into our own apartments. Some of us shacked up with people who had furniture from parents or grandparents or, better yet, flea markets. We began to regard our Ikea shelves with disdain, anger, then, finally, embarrassment.
All of the qualities that had made Ikea furniture so attractive in our late teens and early 20s now made it untenable. “Ikea” became synonymous with cheap – and not in a good way. Over the next five to ten years, we replaced our Ikea bounty with furniture of better quality – mostly hand-me-downs that didn’t involve particleboard – and we vowed we would never, ever set foot in an Ikea again.