How many Poängs have you had in your life?It depends on the price class, basically. The nice thing about IKEA is that you pretty much get what you pay for.IKEA will sell you a $25 bookcase, and they will sell you a $300 bookcase. These are not going to be equally durable.The most popular IKEA bookcase is probably the mid-range BILLY:A full-size BILLY is is $60 in white or $80 in wood veneer. It's made entirely of veneered particleboard. The backer used to be Masonite, but I believe they switched to MDF at some point. These are not ideal materials for durability. Even the best quality particleboard is only pretty on the veneered outside. It is unsuitable for wet locations and damage can be hard to repair, though minor scratches take surprisingly well to a little stain in the right color (hardware stores sell stain in marker pens for this purpose). But given that the thing is made of veneered particleboard, the BILLY is about as good as it gets. The veneer, though thin, is always thick enough, and the finish is quite hard.
I've seen particleboard bookcases from many other manufacturers, and none of them have betrayed as thorough an understanding of the nature of the material as the BILLY. IKEA never puts unreasonable expectations on the ability of inferior materials to hold fasteners directly and always uses fasteners that attach to each other or are specifically adapted for particleboard (e.g. Confirmat type screws). Structurally, these things are sound and can remain so for decades. They may get scratched up, but as for falling apart, that's not so easy.The BILLY is not, however, the cheapest IKEA bookcase. That honor goes to the GERSBY:At $25, available in white only, the GERSBY looks like a great deal, but at this point, we are really talking disposable furniture. It would be foolish to put particularly heavy books on these shelves and expect them not to sag. Mind you, I'm not upset that IKEA has these. Sometimes, you just want the best shelves $25 can buy, and frankly, these probably are the best shelves $25 can buy (if you insist on buying new, anyway).
I suppose that IKEA might have wanted to stay out of the $25 bookcase market for fear of damaging their reputation, but they have apparently decided their customers are smart enough not to hold it against them that their bottom-of-the-range product is, well, shitty, in absolute terms, since it is actually excellent for the price.AssemblyIt's important if you don't want your IKEA furniture to fall apart that you assemble it properly. A lot of this stuff is designed just so and it's structurally sound only if no parts are missing. The thin Masonite backer on a MALM dresser, for instance, is crucial to its structural integrity, and you really do need to hammer in those 50 or so little nails, or else the cabinet won't take racking forces and the fasteners on the corners will over time start damaging the soft particleboard.Start by unpacking and sorting everything and throwing out the packing material so it doesn't clutter up the area. Grab some bowls or tupperware containers or some such and sort the hardware.
The little Allen keys in particular are no good and will scrape your knuckles; a full set of surprisingly nice T-handled metric Allen wrenches at Harbor Freight will set you back all of $10. If you have a cordless drill with a clutch, it can be very helpful; just make sure to set the clutch to a relatively low torque so you don't overdrive fasteners in soft materials. Or use a cheap battery-powered screwdriver that simply doesn't have enough torque to damage anything. You definitely don't want to go using an impact driver for most of this stuff; remember it's all designed so the average IKEA customer can drive the screws by hand, so if it requires real power, you're doing something wrong.Gradual improvementsHaving assembled lots of IKEA furniture over the years, including on many occasions different model years of the same pieces, I've been impressed with the continuous improvements. For the longest time, one consistent complaint I had about IKEA dressers is that the drawer bottoms fell out.
Made of thin MDF or Masonite, the bottoms were actually surprisingly strong when properly fitted in a frame, but racking or bulging of the drawer would cause it to pull away and the weight of the contents would push it down. I assembled a MALM dresser recently and found to my delight that they had added a center support bracket to support the weight of the drawer contents and keep the front and back straight and parallel.American wallsI could not finish this answer without mentioning my one big pet peeve about IKEA furniture: if it's designed to mount to a wall, it's designed for walls that take screws anywhere. I imagine those must be common in Sweden; they definitely are in The Netherlands. Nothing that IKEA makes, except possibly their kitchen cabinets, appears to be made for mounting on a studs-and-drywall hollow wall. Even when the spacing between mounting points is arbitrary, it never coincides with standard US stud spacings. To mount a series of bathroom cabinets, for instance, I had to notch out space for a support rail, screw the support rail to the wall, and attach the cabinets to the support rail.
The most charitable interpretation I have of this is that they figure that bathroom cabinets are lightweight and you should be able to hang them with toggle bolts or some other sort of drywall anchor. I suppose you probably can hang them on toggle bolts, but this hardly seems like a design anybody would have come up with if they were familiar with the pains of hanging cabinets on hollow walls. The design of towel bars and the like can be similarly obnoxious. You have to deal with these design flaws, and if you don't, your stuff won't necessarily fall apart, but it just might fall off.When I say I have a house full of the stuff, I am speaking literally. In a three bedroom house I have only six items not from Ikea. A couch from Dillards, a rocking chair from Cracker Barrel, a metal filing cabinet, a lightweight vintage modern nightstand of indeterminate origin, Tempurpedic mattresss and box springs, and a child’s rocking chair.Aside from those pieces, all of my furniture for a family of four is from Ikea.
Additionally, due to work, college, and other reasons, my family and I have moved an average of once per year for the last 25 years. No, not an exaggeration, a tiring and seemingly inevitable fact of my life.So how easily does Ikea furniture fall apart?It depends entirely on the quality of the assembly.How do you maximize the life of your Ikea furniture?Follow the instructions carefully. It helps to identify every piece and fastener ahead of time. It also helps if you have decent quality tools instead of relying on the throw aways that Ikea includes in the box.Assemble in an area with plenty of room to spread everything out. This keeps you from damaging the parts during the assembly process.Wood glue at every wood to wood joint that you want to stay together.Do not over tighten anything. You have to have a good feel for how tight is “just right” without leaving anything loose. It is often a good idea to get as much as you can “almost” tightened, and then tighten them all at once in a methodical pattern that keeps everything lined up properly.