We all know the drill. We need a new bookcase. A new TV stand. A new wall widget. And our budget is practically nonexistent.
So we go to Wal-Mart. Or Costco. Or any of a number of other places which might have the furniture we’re looking for. All of these, which aren’t dedicated furniture stores, have one thing in common with most of their furniture:
It’s made out of tiny chunks of wood, glued together.
Some call it plywood. Others call it chipboard. Regardless, it’s the detritus of wood, left over after other operations, glued together. It’s very inexpensive to produce, and very heavy for its size.
And we are rabid consumers of the stuff. As I look around my front room, I can see several pieces of chipboard furniture. And as I look in my side yard, I see the pieces I recently removed which I’ll be dragging to the dumpster later.
Chipboard stuff doesn’t last. It doesn’t look good. It’s not even really “wood”, it’s a substance of glue and sawdust covered with a PVC laminate to look like wood. Yet, because it’s cheap, we’ll buy three $50 bookcases to last us 10 years rather than one $800 bookcase to last a lifetime.
I’m beginning to hate the stuff. Yet who can argue that the price is right?
I think that I would rather h
I think that I would rather have the chipboard at this point. As I look around my room I have hand me down peices. So of these are crap and some are real wood. However the real wood peices are now missing peices. My chest has a molding peice missing from right above the drawer so that when you look at you can see all of the hideaway things sticking out. Not really hidding away. On the other hand the chipboard desk we have is holding up fine and looks very nice. It also keeps it’s shine better than any of my wood peices. At this point for the shine give me the chip. Teresa the Flautist and fire dancer
Down With Particle Board!
This post gave me shudders and sparked some repressed memories of one of history’s worst jobs. I spent too many months foisting particle board bookcases on unsuspecting customers (we called them ‘suckers’) while serving my penance at The Door Store, a long-time DC retail furniture institution that is no longer with us. May it rest – just not in peace.
Let me tell you – nothing good can come from particle board products such as you describe. I must have assembled hundreds of bookcases in my time there. I’ve carried them on my back, up stairs, across dirt fields, I’ve carried them here and there, I’ve carried them everywhere. I’ve fallen in them, on them, and had more than one fall on me. Sometimes, I think I spent more time with particle board bookcases than I did with Lisa, in the months before the wedding.
The irony, though, is this: When we moved to the new house in Silver Spring and needed a piece of furniture for an entertainment center of sorts, we considered a particle board contraption, a nice piece comprised of billions of little pieces of wood, which would have worked fine. In a fit of dementia, though, we decided to ‘get real’ and ‘Buy American’ and purchase a real, actual piece of bona fide furniture. Lisa’s dad works at Mastercraft, and they had a warehouse sale, and before we knew it, three burly men were carrying in our new armoire. I didn’t catch onto the fact that it requires three burly men to move the armoire, though, so now, the armoire sits there, never to be moved by mortal man again. When we move, if we move, I am confident the armoire will convey, along with the drapes and a nasty water stain on one of the bathroom ceilings. Ahh, how I wished I’d gone with the modular chipboard piece now.
You’re right, though, Matt. The price is so appealing, that faux wood laminate somehow so enticing that resistance is futile. Almost as if there is some chipboard pheromone calling out to us.
The fancy chipboard entertainment center
We went for the fancy chipboard entertainment center. Then we had a moderate flood in our basement (less than an inch of water).
Real wood holds up in those kinds of circumstances. Not well — it swells, and often needs to be refinished afterwards — but it doesn’t completely collapse. Usually. Well, the feet on that behemoth just collapsed under its own weight. Sad, really, because it was over $200 and we kind of liked it. Now it’s kind of a huge eyesore we’re thinking maybe we can get some suck…. erm, some smart shoppers to buy from us.
Add to that the desk that wore out and the movie rack that that exploded the moment I tried to pick it up from where it had sat for a year, and I’d like to be done with the stuff.
And yet, that siren song of “buy 5 of these for the price of 1 of those” keeps calling me…
—
Matthew P. Barnson
A real armoire!
First, Tim, welcome to Barnson.org!
Secondly, don’t ever regret that beauty of yours…the armoire! I’m sure you could move it, with three more burly guys help! It would be well worth it and much too expensive to replace.
At this point in life, I figure that with little kids and their habits, despite hard work to teach them to respect property, tend to be hard on any furniture. I’d rather not have them ruin an expensive piece.
The couple pieces we just chucked were much older than we’ve been married, so they were ready to go. We have invested in a nice bedroom set for our room and we enjoy the fine wood work very much.
I personally, would love to learn how to do wood working myself to build my own beautiful furniture. Back in high school, that same shop class was for the nerds who needed an easy A. I never took it. Personally, I didn’t want to be the only girl in a class of weird guys. Now I’m thinking it would have been the best class I could have taken to save money later in life.
Now I’m thinking, if I had the time (and $$) I could buy the machinery for cheaper than the cost of the furniture and learn to build my own. Then the need for space comes into the picture. We only have a one car garage right now and it’s used as storage space. Heaven forbid a car actually be stored there! Then the cost of building a shop comes into play and suddenly that chip board POS is looking quite nice.
We do have a couple nice pieces that were inexpensive. This computer desk I’m sitting at is very nice. It’s a tall corner desk that uses it’s space very efficiently.
And BTW, Costco furniture is not particle board and it is not cheap. If I had the money, I would love to purchase some of their beautiful bookcases. But for now, we’ll make the best of what we have!–
Christy
hehe
You said POS. Funny! ——– Visit my blog, eh! The Murphy Maphia
Mr. Clarke..
Boy oh boy..
I have so many friends who are actors that I get used to the “ooh, you have a house and some money to spend” vibe.. and start to feel really good about myself..
then, someone comes over like my Dad and looks at my furniture..
A Chipboard Entertainment center next to an old used couch next to a chipboard bookshelf nest to our only piece of wood.. a dining room table we never ever use.
Add to that the coffee singles, the Sutter Home Wine (and we’re even trying Franzia), the generic Honey Smacks, and the freezer full of lean cuisines and suddenly all that feeling of success goes away.
Its like you can get “kinda pretty good” stuff easily.. and it gets hard to justify spending 400 bucks on a bookshelf when you can spend 100 or less and have it look just as good to anyone who needs to be wearing glasses.
Fold-Out Garden Chairs
At least you all are lucky enough to HAVE particle board.
We moved into our house last fall and for the first six months had fold-out garden chairs as the ONLY piece of furniture in our downstairs rec room. We weren’t even fortunate enough to have particle board. We dreamed of one day saving up enough money to go buy a nive particle board front door, or roof.
We should be so lucky.
Caveat emptor
Well, I could go on a tirade about the American culture of disposable goods, and its connection to the downside of capitalism and the oppression of the poor, but frankly I just don’t have the energy.
— Ben
Tough decisions.. .
I actually have a mixture of both types of furniture in my house. The entertainment center is Press board (yes another name for chipboard). It was nice when I first got married about 9 years ago. It served its prupose, but now lacks the beauty that we like of real wood. The bookcases in the same room are real wood and look great. I just recently bought bookcases for the bedroom to help with storing all my technical and non-technical books. Those bookcases are pressboard. The difference in prices between the real wood bookcases which were about $120 a piece i think and the pressboard ones which were about $20 a piece (gotta love Target). I would buy wood for it’s beauty and durability every day of the week, except for the price issue.
plywood
You confuse plywood, chipboard, particle board which are all different products with different properties.
Well, let’s see…
Plywood: Tough, durable, generally not wonderful to look at, but for the size, stronger than “real” wood. I use it a lot when building model airplanes; a sheet of 1/32″ beech ply is stronger than three times its width in non-ply beech. Good stuff, just not good for finish work.
Chipboard: POS with big chunks. Particle board: POS with tiny chunks.
Meh, whatever 🙂
—
Matthew P. Barnson
(to lazy to figure out a subject line)
Plywood can be nice. I am not certain about what you would use for modeling, but for building furniture and the like it is usually a nice alternative to standard lumber. You can get a nice piece of furniture grade plywood that has a laminate of whatever “finished” wood you are looking for. Our new Entertainment center is built with this kind of construction. The wood for the most part is either cherry, or cherry veneer plywood.
Now that I am more comfortable in my woodworking abilities, I plan on making a good deal of the furniture for the basement that we are finishing. should provide me with some fun projects.