Wisdom Gained From Assembling a Child’s Desk
December 28th, 2010 - 9:15 pm
If it comes in a flat box labeled “Made in China,” it is not furniture. It is, at best, a short-lived assemblage of questionable durability, limited usefulness and endless headaches.
Ah yes, the joys of assembly instructions written by a english third or fourth language speaker.
Youngest son has one of those student desks. Was not as hard to assemble as it could have been, I’ve done a lot of translating of instructions.
Never used as a desk. Had his computer on it to begin with, now has his TV and various game consoles. He uses his Mom’s computer and the much roomier kitchen table for school work.
Sounds like Ikea with a different accent.
I was just thinking that, except with IKEA, if you’re very careful, you can assemble it without breaking anything and it will look nice for a few weeks, months maybe even.
Actually, IF (yes, that particular one deserved capitals) something from IKEA looked good to begin with, it tends to stay that way. Quality of furniture is a trait relatively visible to naked eye, no matter where it’s been made. Also tends to correlate with price rather strongly, even in IKEA…
A mere 30 minutes with a pencil and paper and a few more at a Home Depot could provide one with the necessary wood, paint, glue, and tools to construct one’s own desk. And, factoring in the useful life of the tools required, it will cost less than the vinyl-wrapped, formaldehyde-venting, Pres-to-log stuff that passes for wood in those kits.
We used to make furniture in this country, then we decided that factory work was just not good enough for our kids and we set about ensuring that our education system and our value system would work towards making entire generations of American boys and girls into English professors.
Those so called icky factory jobs went overseas where Indian and Chinese families have no squeamishness about their kids working in factories. And now here we are making furniture in the US again, only its not in factories, or our kids doing it for a wage, its us on the garage floor in the wee hours, and the final product is not as good as it once was. Somehow I think we have gone backwards here.
All I really want is a 3D Printer that takes in wood pulp and plasticizer where I can then feed it the design I want (Via USB of course!) and out comes a complete piece of furniture. All this “shipping” seems so 1990′s to me.
Perhaps Amazon will create a 3D Printer function where I can send digital designs, they create the object and get it to me overnight via Amazon Prime. Cloud computing? How ’bout Cloud manufacturing…