Ikea Brimnes 3 Door Wardrobe (and why it is "disposable furniture")

To start, the Ikea Brimnes Wardrobe functions well, and I have no particular quality issues so far. More so, for our purposes this gives my wife the full usage of the walk-in closet and works better for us. We bought the wardrobe as cheap, disposable furniture for our move to Florida knowing it may not last a move thereafter.

I am not going to give instruction on how to build this; the Ikea instructions are comprehensive. I would recommend using two people when placing this against a wall once assembled.

The back of the wardrobe is essentially a three trifold piece of cardboard nailed to the back. While this provides some strength and reinforcement to the wardrobe it would be much better to use a thin piece of hardwood ply. Further, gluing the backing to the rest of the wardrobe rather than just nails would ensure even better strength. Chances are when we move the rear of this wardrobe will be punctured or damaged significantly because of its weakness.

A lot of cheaper furniture is made with medium-densityfiberboard (MDF) instead of hardwood plywood or hardwood. In addition to the issues linked at the site I would add that because of the fiber and resin aspects of MDF it is particularly susceptible to being reduced to dust by course screws (more on these later) which the furniture often uses.

MDF makes a great base for veneers and veneers are a fantastic way to make a less expensive structural piece of wood have a much nicer and more expensive wood as the shown surface. The problem with veneers though is they are thin and hold up badly to being moved and are easily damaged. Some of this can be fixed by finishing the veneer very well to give it added durability but that is rarely done on cheaper furniture.

Cheaper furniture also more frequently uses screws over glue and other joining techniques. And most often coarse threaded screws which chew up and pulverize the MDF they are screwed into when assembled, disassembled and moved, and reassembled. If we only screw through the MDF once with the coarse screws there likely would not be an issue. But if you go to take this furniture apart and move it (take apart because it uses cardboard as a structural member, which does not bode well for moving) then you are chewing up the MDF and making looser holding joints in the future.

Lastly the cheaper furniture tends to use lower end joining techniques like screws and nails instead of the significantly more substantial joints such as mortise and tenon, dovetail, box, dowelled, and other such joints that provide for a lot of friction fit and surface area for gluing two pieces of wood together.

Part of the reason for this is manufacturing cost. It is much cheaper to mass produce predrilled CNC panels for screws than it is to mass produce joints that need to be glued and clamped. Furthermore by not using glue and its inherent oozing out of joints there is less work to be done for finishing the product. This furniture in a box with some assemble required is much cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to move / ship, and cheaper to store (flat in boxes instead of taking space as mostly assembled pieces).

My hope is that you find this informative. We do occasionally buy “disposable” furniture to fill a short term needs, whereas when I got the bed from This End Up and the nightstands, and refinished the This End Up bed these were bought as permanent pieces that can and would be moved and their useful life to be measured in decades rather than in maybe a handful of years. The cost differential versus durability is definitely something to consider when fulfilling your furniture needs.