Weak material

You have probably seen those 'modern' furnished rooms, bedrooms, living rooms or rooms for small houses. The photos are in home design magazines and Ikea also has many examples. It's interesting to see how much can be crammed into a small room. It all seems very efficient, but it is more intended for a student or a young person, sometimes a young and flexible couple.

Anyone who wants to copy such a device is often disappointed. The surface of the room may be the same, but if doors and windows are in a different place or there are more of them, the ceiling is sloping or there are fewer electrical sockets, then there is little that can be imitated.

Even those with small homes need space. It is not practical to live in a cramped small room where you always have to convert your couch into a bed or crawl into the bed under the ceiling via a ladder. Nice if you are healthy, but a burden if you are ill or elderly.

Model homes always look luxurious and tidy. The average person is not tidy, not even 20% of the population cleans and scrubs their home. The bed linen has not been changed weekly for decades. The old-fashioned housewife has been gone for a long time.

The fact is most of us don't live in a model home. When it comes down to it, home furnishings must be practical and solid.

Most of it is not solid. Everything produced is intended to be replaced as quickly as possible. We live in a disposable society created by manufacturers. If every item lasted a lifetime, most companies would have gone bankrupt long ago. Those big companies don't care about the environment. The only thing that matters to them is making more money every year. If this is not possible in their country, a market must be found elsewhere. As long as there are still people who want to belong to the 'luxury' Western world and loans are provided, junk will be sold.

Today vintage is the magic word, although vintage is simply second-hand and definitely does not have the quality of antique.

Back to Ikea...their quality isn't that great either,l and for sure they are not cheap. Anyone who walks through an Ikea store and looks at the items carefully will notice this. So do those who have been customers there for a few decades. They can tell the difference too.

And while Ikea brags about its bed sheets containing recycled plastic, Lego reports that they will no longer reuse old plastic because this technique is very polluting.

Polluting or not, lifespan counts for the average consumer. It is impossible to replace the entire housing council every two years. Still, when I look back on my life, I have bought and replaced a lot of things. What a waste of money that was. If I had been alone, everything would definitely have lasted longer. The larger the family, the faster something breaks, especially with children, pets and visitors.

Kitchens.

Those amazing kitchens we see, are not suitable for those who love to cook and bake. Anyone who does knows that you have to clean thoroughly once done. Such a kitchen must be able to withstand that. In our case, after one attempt to clean the stove knobs, the positions had already been wiped off, there is moisture between the double pane of the oven door and the plastic handle of the oven door broke off. The oven itself is far from easy to clean. Current kitchen equipment cannot withstand (daily) thorough cleaning but is also not easy to maintain.

The Chinese market may not be good or attractive for some, but it often offers many cheaper alternatives. Let's face it, most of what is manufactured and we pay for in our own country is fabricated in China anyway (or another Asian country). The only advantage of buying in the place you live may be that the local retailer has already paid the customs fees.

Take care of your property, handle it carefully and keep it dry and clean.

If you don't need much, are careful with your belongings and are a bit handy, you don't need to spend that much to furnish your room (house) nicely. Whether cheap is expensive often depends on the item and how you handle the purchase.

From experience, I can tell you can enjoy these cheap items, floor lamps included, for a long time, even though the material is weak.

If it comes to my floor lamps I have to twist the tube together and the bottom of the tube is bolt screwed into a nut in the plastic base. That plastic base doesn't look like much quality and doesn't weigh much either. It is filled with cement. The tube has to be tightened regularly and perhaps that is where something went wrong. The plastic tore and the 'cement' fell out in pieces. I patched the crack with some super glue (I couldn't get the pieces pushed into place properly) and next I poured cement into it. The bottom is not completely smooth because the nut in the middle protrudes more. I'll solve that with a piece of thick cardboard underneath or something else.

Fixed cement is not expensive. You just need to add a bit of water to it, mix it, pour it and wait (keep it wet so it will not dry too fast and break if the temperature is high). I have some left from my gravestone December gift project.

The lamp's new spot will be in the corner next to the bed. It can be used again and no longer be in the "middle" of the room. If this doesn't work out in the long run, I will use the lampshades for the lamps that currently have nothing and I will save the cord with dimmer.

Do not just throw away if what you bought gets broken. Try to repair it, use parts for something else or see if someone else can use it. If you do not have a 'Giveaway or Exchange cabinet' in your neighbourhood you could start one yourself.

8-11-2023

All photos are taken by me.