I love Ikea!

yeah, we made some good connections with a local store manager and we buy their floor models at discounted rates, they are usually a little damaged but nothing major and with a kid and a cat anyway new things never stay nice looking lol

I wish I had the money enough to care where it was made. I have to go with cheapest.

Interesting note here: Australia is one of the few countries in the world that irradiate food. Other countries have poo-poo'd on it because they're afraid of cancers and radiation. But really, all they do is expose the food to just enough to keep it fresher longer.

Milk is different in Australia too...I don't remember how, specifically.

I'm currently saving for furniture from Ikea that I love the look of..It's the Hopen bedroom furniture. I have to buy online no Ikea in this town. I'm not sure the quality of the furniture but it look really nice to me and isn't too expensive..The bedframe I want is like $180 and the dresser is $100 and the desk with shelf connect will be like $100.

you say "and if that fails I head to Ikea" do you think they have good quality furniture or not? I'm lookig online and I love the Hopen bedroom series....

Some of it is really good. The head board I got for my bed has held up well to sundry nefarious activities and I have some shelves n such that have survived several moves. I had one sort of end table that wasn't so stable after awhile, but it was a faulty piece of some sort and I got a replacement no problem.

The problem with Ikea furniture is that almost all of the piece is made of MDF or press board. That type of material does not hold up at all to any type of abuse. Water will make it swell and the joints will fall apart. Screws do not have 1/10 or the holding power they would have in real wood, hard or soft.
I came home one day to find that my wife had purchased a book case from Ikea for my boys books. It was all MDF and press board. After I put it together for her, under protest for her spending the $50; it only lasted for about a month before it started to fall apart. They shelves could not hold the weight of the books, something a book case is designed to do. The screws started to pull out, and once the wood is striped of the threads you can not reattach more screws into the holes. And I have no idea what kind of toxic chemicals were used in the finish process.
Her reason was that she did not want to spend the $150-$200 for a solid hardwood book case, one that we would still have to this day in my boys room. I am in no way saying to not buy anything from Ikea, all I am saying is that you get what you pay for most of the time. It is the same for just about anything. You cant just look at a sticker price, you need to look at how it was made, what it was made of, and how long it will last you. Are you really saving your self money, if you need to replace the item before you have out grown it?

I'm not sorry. I don't trust anything with a brand name, and I sure as hell won't pay the extra money for it.

My brother's a bit of an idiot when it comes to that area of stuff. He used to be obsessed with Adidas and the like when he was younger, too. A $20 pair of shoes for $120 just because it has a logo on it. Ridiculous.

QUALITY. Price is important, but furniture is not bought very often and cheap furniture, if it falls apart, may be no real long term bargain. Of course, starting out or on limited funds...you get whatever you can afford.