[biot]

Even ignoring all that, it cost me more to build my own bookshelf from lumber and materials at Home Depot than it would have cost to buy a nice, pre-made bookshelf from Ikea. Presumably Ikea has factored their costs into the resulting price.

[lsc]

I'm not sure that home depot sells the laminated? particle board used in ikea furniture. If you used unlaminated particle board, you'd certainly come out a lot cheaper at home depot. heck, most ikea desks could be made out of one 4x8 sheet, so even if you used slightly higher quality plywood, you'd probably come out ahead in terms of materials cost.

Yup, for less than USD$8 you get a 4x8 sheet of OSB[1]; I'd bet money that stuff is stronger than the stuff ikea makes desks out of. Now, I dono how much it takes to laminate that stuff nicely like ikea does, but the raw materials for cheap 'engineered wood products' are incredibly inexpensive. Heck, for $2 you can get an 8' long 2x4 that is actual wood. buy two of those and you can build something much stronger than the standard ikea desk.

Now, I'm sure it costs ikea less to build the desk than it would cost you to buy the materials, but just like amazon isn't going to sell you compute nodes for less than the cost of buying and co-locating servers even though it costs them less, ikea isn't going to sell to you at those prices.

[1]http://www.homedepot.com/Lumber-Composites-Plywood-Sheathing...

[dagw]

The cheapest desktop at Ikea costs $6[1], and that's pre-laminated and everything. I've bought stuff at Ikea before to cut up and use in other products because it was cheaper than going out and buying the raw materials.

[1](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50071170/)

[lsc]

Ah. I was thinking you wanted to make a desk, not just the top, which you could do with the 4x8 sheet, some screws, and maybe a two by four. (Am I imagining things? or did you edit your original post to say bookshelf rather than desk? it's okay, I edit my posts too; you could also make a bookshelf out of that 4x8 sheet, if your time was free and you had the carpentry skills.)

Even so, the 3' x 2' bit of 'wood product' from ikea costs almost as much as a 4'x8' piece of 'wood product' from home depot. That's more than 5 ikea tables worth of wood.

I think the dramatically increased price (percentage wise, of course, not dollar wise) of the ikea part is in the addition of the laminate on top and on the sides; you can't really cut the laminated particle board to size once you get it, unless you want exposed sawdust-wood, so we are back to manu

I mean, I'm not saying the ikea stuff isn't good; I'm just saying that they, generally speaking, are charging considerably more (as a percentage, not in terms of dollars, and for a $7 item, even if their markup is 4x, well, you probably aren't going to notice.) than what materials cost.

[biot]

I was the one who said bookshelf (no edits were made). I made it out of planks of wood and wood screws. The Ikea bookshelf uses wood planks but of a lighter/less durable kind of wood. I'm sure mine might have held up cast iron books where the Ikea version would have failed, but as a regular bookshelf for paper books, the price/performance of the Ikea product would have met my needs more than adequately at a decent cost savings.