More Than Just IKEA: 5 Ways to Buy Furniture on the Cheap Whether you’re currently moving or simply need a new nightstand, it’s uncool to drop hundreds and hundreds of dollars on furniture. Only buy online when there are product guarantees and returns. Nothing’s worse than investing in great furniture only to have it ruined by burst pipes. Make sure to nab good renter’s insurance, which is really cheap compared to the benefits you gain. (If your apartment is destroyed, the insurance will replace your belongings and pay for you to stay in a hotel.) Here are the top five ways to get what you need and make your house beautiful, without breaking the bank: 1. Time Your Shopping Like fashion, furniture has its seasons. Office furniture (desks, bookshelves) tend to be cheaper in January, while October is the best time for dining room furniture. Patio furniture usually goes on sale at the end of the summer. Bedroom furniture is a perennial need, so it doesn’t have a predictable sales pattern…but mattresses and box springs tend go on sale in May and again in the fall.
Also, keep in mind regular holidays such as Independence Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day, when department stores have major sales. 2. Buy Furniture Slowly Even if you’re still young, items like bed frames and coffee tables can easily follow you for over a decade. Furniture represents one of the biggest costs of moving: We’re talking about mattresses, bed frames, TVs, desks, chairs, artwork, lamps…you get the idea. Beds alone can cost almost $1,000. So, treat these purchases as big investments, buy slowly, and make sure that these are objects you’ll be grateful for ten years down the road. 3. Nab It on the Cheap Meanwhile, if you just need something quickly and on the cheap (or if you’re furnishing a sublet or dorm room), IKEA is the place to go. The pieces there are sleek and cheap, which makes them easy to replace every couple years. Our favorites include this simple bamboo nightstand for only $15 and this easy, modern shelf unit for $40. Shipping rates can range from as low as $19 to $299, so if there’s a store near you, go in and pick up the items yourself.
4. Get It Used (or Get It Free) Scour Craigslist under the “Furniture” section to find cheap (and often free) furniture. A lot of the items we’ve found on the ’list are pretty legit because many people just want someone to come pick it up from their homes when they’re moving. We nabbed a full bookshelf for $35, and got a king-sized bed frame for $80. Here’s our short guide to buying on Craigslist: Be discriminating before trekking out to someone’s house: Ask how old the pieces are, whether the current owners have pets, whether they’re smokers, and where the furniture has been stored (you don’t want to pay full price for a table that’s been stored outside, exposed to the elements, for the past six months). Do not take used mattresses, and be careful with anything that has upholstery! Time yourself: Know exactly what you want and be patient so that you find the perfect item at a great price—but then, when you see something that’s right, email the seller immediately, lest you lose out!
If you trek out to see an item, be ready to walk out with it. Most sellers want to get rid of their items stat. So, if you drive out to look at someone’s bed frame, don’t expect him to wait another week while you think about it. Arrange payment type before you meet the seller; exact change in cash is usually best, since these are people like you who probably feel nervous accepting checks (and definitely don’t take plastic!). Negotiate the price…if the listing is old. If it’s a newer listing, just be glad to get the item while it’s still available. 5. Be Creative: Make Your Old Furniture New Again Sometimes, you just need to refurbish a little. You never know: Maybe all your old coffee table needs is a little bit of paint to make it look fresh again. Or, maybe you don’t need a new couch – you just need to reupholster your current one.YOUR BROWSER IS NOT FULLY SUPPORTED BY LEARNVEST.. We currently support Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8+.
Click Here To UpgradeHow many Poängs have you had in your life?Browse the 2017 IKEA Catalog Also available for iPhone, Follow IKEA USA on: > "ikea" in furniture in Toronto (GTA) Use Distance Search to find Ads based on where you are and how far you want to travel. Get an alert with the newest ads for "ikea" in Toronto (GTA).Ikea is a behemoth. The home furnishing company uses 1 percent of the planet’s lumber, it says, and the 530 million cubic feet of wood used to make Ikea furniture each year pulls with its own kind of twisted gravity. For many, a sojourn to the enormous blue-and-yellow store winds up defining the space in which they sit, cook, eat and sleep. All that wood is turned into furniture that tries to bring a spare, modern aesthetic to the masses. “We’re talking about democratizing design,” Marty Marston, a product public relations manager at Ikea, told me. The furniture is also sold according to some unique economics. In many cases, Ikea’s famously affordable pieces get dramatically cheaper year after year.
In others, prices creep up. In some cases, products disappear entirely. The result is an ever-evolving, survival-of-the-fittest catalog that wields an enormous amount of influence over residential interiors. As we tour Ikea’s unique economics, you may want to have a seat in the company’s Poäng chair, 1.5 million of which are sold each year. Ikea’s been hawking them around the world for the past four decades, taking over living room square footage and modern design sensibilities with just a hex wrench and some wordless instructions. The Poäng’s midcentury-modern forebear was the Finnish designer Alvar Aalto’s 1939 creation called simply armchair 406, which had its own bent-birch frame, swooping arms and thin tan upholstery. The Poäng’s design was first sold decades later, in 1978, after a collaboration between Lars Engman and Noboru Nakamura. Nakamura, in a company brochure celebrating his chair’s 40th anniversary, said that even though trends and fashion influence what he designs, “all products should have a timeless value.”
But it’s less the fashion trends than the resulting furniture economics that make this particular history interesting. Versions of the Aalto sell online for over $4,000. The Poäng debuted at a fraction of the price of the Aalto, and now, after a steep price decline, the Poäng sells at a fraction of its original price. Furniture has generally gotten cheaper relative to other goods over the years — likely due to effects of globalization — but this chair’s trend stands out. In the early 1990s, the chair couldn’t be had for less than $300, adjusted for inflation. (The average piece of $300 dollar furniture in 1990 would cost about $151 today, per the consumer price index for furniture and bedding.) I was inspired to browse old Ikea catalogs and prices after seeing the iconic Poäng — bent birch, swooping arms, thin tan upholstery — in an ’80s movie. Or so I thought. After a few rewinds, however, I realized I’d made an embarrassing mistake. I had been looking at the Aalto 406 all along.
It wasn’t only lumber purchases that Ikea had come to dominate, but also my internal aesthetic compass. What isn’t Ikea becomes Ikea, and what is Ikea becomes everything. Other Ikea mainstays have followed Poäng’s path, plummeting in price as the years pass. The warhorse Lack table, for example, sold for $25 in 1985 ($56 in current dollars) but goes for just $10 today. Iterations of the Billy bookcases have seen big drops, as well. But it’s not as simple as saying that everything in the 1988 Ikea catalog has gotten radically cheaper over time. The full story is, as full stories always are, subtler. Anthony Landry, a research adviser at the Bank of Canada, and Marianne Baxter, an economist at Boston University, have studied swaths of data culled from old Ikea catalogs and how they reflect economic concepts — exchange-rate pass-through and the law of one price, for example. Baxter, who loves midcentury-modern designs such as Aalto’s, shared some slices of that data with me, and we discussed the phenomena she and Landry spotted within it.
In addition to the steadily decreasing prices of much of the product line, the researchers also identified Ikea’s tendency to constantly modify its menu of products and varieties. “I think this is a pattern for products that survive for a long time,” Baxter said of the steep price drops. “Basically, they won’t survive unless they’re cost effective. I think the economies of scale really kicked in for that chair.” Even Ikea employees told me they marvel at the declines. “We pulled out a 1985 catalog, and we started looking at products,” Marston said. “It was really fun for us to say, ‘Oh my God, look at the price of that. Look how expensive it was when we first came here to this country.’” Although Baxter can’t yet prove its particulars — more data cleaning and analysis is necessary for her ultimate Ikea project — there is a sort of evolutionary dynamic at play in the annual Ikea catalog: survival of the fittest furniture. She noticed that the company tends to discontinue products that remain expensive.
“If they can’t figure out how to make them more cheaply, or retool them or slightly redesign them, it seems like the things disappear,” she said. Indeed, the products have evolved. In 1992, part of the Poäng was changed from steel to wood, allowing the chair to ship more densely and efficiently in the company’s flat packs. (“Shipping air is very expensive,” Marston said.) And the Lack table was changed from solid wood to a honeycomb “board on frame” construction, decreasing production costs and increasing shipping efficiency. Baxter theorizes, though, that if a product is finicky — requiring design in Sweden, manufacture in China and intricate pieces from Switzerland, say — it may eventually be abandoned. Marston thought the Darwinian idea was interesting, but that the deletions from the catalog were less about persistently high prices and more about popularity. “If a product doesn’t perform well — we have certain sales expectations — then it will cease to exist.