The Enshittification of Furniture (aka The Ikea Effect)

The Bookshelf That Ruined Me For All Other Bookshelves

Years ago, before I moved to Scotland, I bought a bookshelf from Fantastic Furniture. Solid pine. Glass panelling. The kind of piece that looked like it had opinions and good posture. It arrived already assembled. No box of unlabelled dowels. No Allen key rattling around like a threat. It was just… furniture. A finished object, ready to hold my life.

I loved that bookshelf the way you love a good coat or a reliable friend. It didn’t wobble. It didn’t creak when you looked at it wrong. When I moved overseas, I sold it to someone who I’m sure is still enjoying its structural integrity to this day, because that thing was built like it intended to outlive me.

Seven years later, I came home. And I went looking for its replacement with the same casual confidence of someone who didn’t yet know the furniture landscape had been quietly gutted while she was gone.

I Came Home To Chipboard

What I found instead was chipboard wearing a timber veneer like a cheap costume. Every bookcase I looked at was flat packed, vaguely wood adjacent, and accompanied by instructions that looked like they’d been translated four times by someone with a grudge. Missing numbers. Diagrams that seemed to describe a different piece of furniture entirely. Step seven simply did not exist, and step eight assumed you’d telepathically absorbed it.

There’s an unspoken expectation baked into flatpack furniture, and it’s this: that someone else will help you build it. A partner. A dad. A vaguely handy mate who owns a proper drill and knows what an Allen key actually is. It assumes you’re not doing this alone, and if you are, that’s your problem to solve, not the manufacturer’s.

Sir, I built my own queen sized bed. Solo. With a pink toolkit and a level of stubbornness that should honestly be studied. I am a single woman in her forties, and I do not need a man to hold the other end of a wardrobe while I curse at a hex bolt. I just needed the instructions to make sense, which, in this economy, is apparently the real luxury item.

Thank You Ikea, Very Cool

Let’s be honest about where this started. Ikea didn’t invent flatpack furniture, but they made it the norm, then made the norm profitable, and every other furniture chain looked at those margins and thought, oh, we could do that too. Why pay for solid timber and proper joinery when you can ship a box of particleboard and let the customer supply the labour for free?

It’s a genius business model if you don’t think about it too hard. Cut the cost of materials. Cut the cost of skilled assembly. Cut the cost of shipping, because flat packs stack efficiently. Then charge roughly the same as you would for something that actually lasts, and call it modern, minimalist, accessible design.

The result is a furniture market where almost everything looks the same, breaks the same way, and gets replaced on the same three to five year cycle. We didn’t just lose beautiful furniture. We lost the expectation that furniture should last, and once an entire industry stops expecting durability, they stop building for it.

Paying Premium Prices For Zero Personality

Here’s what gets me. Flatpack furniture isn’t even cheap anymore. A chipboard sofa frame with all the soul of a filing cabinet costs nearly what a well made piece used to cost, before everyone decided cutting corners was a design philosophy. We’re paying near premium prices for furniture with a premium’s worth of nothing behind it.

There’s no character in a piece that a thousand other households also own in the exact same finish. No story. No weight. No sense that the thing was made by someone who cared whether it survived contact with real life. It’s furniture designed to be replaced, not lived with, and somewhere along the way we all just quietly accepted that as normal.

I think about my old pine bookshelf a lot. Not because I’m precious about furniture, but because it represented something we’ve genuinely lost access to unless we go looking for it deliberately. Which, annoyingly, is exactly what I’ve had to start doing.

How I’m Actually Fighting Back

So here’s what I’ve been doing instead of walking into the big chains and accepting my chipboard fate. I bought a console table from Amazon, brass and glass, sturdy and genuinely gorgeous, for less than the flatpack version at a major retailer. I bought another from a tiny online store that has since vanished into the internet ether, solid wood, beautifully made, also cheaper than the big name alternative. Turns out the mid tier chains aren’t even winning on price. They’re just winning on convenience and advertising budget.

Secondhand is the other move. Marketplace, thrift stores, the odd estate clearance. You’d be shocked what’s sitting in someone’s garage for eighty dollars because they’re renovating and don’t want to deal with it. Solid, well made, decades old furniture that will outlive every flatpack unit currently being assembled incorrectly across the country.

And then there’s reupholstery, which is where Lulu comes in. My little hell spawn has absolutely destroyed the fabric on my sofa and my bed frame, clawed to shreds like he’s got a personal vendetta against soft furnishings specifically. But the frames underneath are still solid, so instead of tossing perfectly good bones and buying new chipboard replacements, I’m reupholstering. About a hundred dollars a piece, which is a fraction of buying new, and I get to keep something structurally sound while building an actual skill instead of an Allen key callus.

None of this fixes the industry. The big chains will keep selling chipboard dressed up as design, and people will keep buying it because it’s there and it’s easy. But you don’t have to participate in the enshittification just because it’s the path of least resistance. Look sideways. Look secondhand. Look at what you already own before you assume it needs replacing. Your future self, and your bookshelf, will thank you.

Who Said Anything About a Crisis? – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking the midlife crisis myth. You know the one. The narrative that says women in their forties are supposed to be falling apart, panicking about relevance, desperately reinventing themselves before it's too late. We're told we should be burnt out, lonely with our cats, spiralling into some kind of existential breakdown that requires a retreat, a programme, or a very expensive rebrand.But here's what actually happens. You get comfortable. You get clear. You stop apologising for knowing what you like and who you are. The charm becomes fully operational. The gut instinct you've been overriding to be polite finally gets the microphone. And instead of a crisis, you get something much better. You get the glow up.Today we're talking about why the bar for female happiness is set so absurdly low, how your forties are actually when life gets good, and why no one needs to audit a woman who has spent decades deliberately curating her own existence. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @bryjaimea

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