Topic Battle

IKEA furniture offers clean Scandinavian lines, a colour palette ranging from birch to slightly darker birch, and the democratic promise that every home can achieve the same minimalist elegance as a Stockholm apartment. The aesthetic is purposefully inoffensive, designed to complement any decor style from modern to vaguely modern. It photographs beautifully for estate agent listings.

The IKEA furniture specimen arrives in its natural habitat: a suspiciously heavy cardboard box bearing cryptic Swedish nomenclature. Assembly requires approximately three to seven hours, depending on one's relationship with wordless instruction manuals and the availability of spare allen keys. The process typically involves several emotional phases: optimism, confusion, existential questioning, and finally, triumphant completion marred by the discovery of two leftover screws of uncertain purpose.

Constructed primarily from particleboard and Scandinavian optimism, IKEA furniture exhibits a theoretical lifespan of fifteen to twenty years under laboratory conditions. In practice, this figure plummets dramatically with each house move, each accidental collision with a vacuum cleaner, and each encounter with the liquid contents of toppled beverages. The notorious cam lock fastener, once disassembled, never quite achieves its original structural integrity upon reassembly.

IKEA furniture demands minimal maintenance: occasional dusting, perhaps the tightening of loosened screws, and the periodic acceptance that certain water stains have become permanent features. It does not require feeding, veterinary attention, or overnight accommodation when owners travel. The furniture remains precisely where positioned, asking nothing beyond the occasional furniture polish.

The BILLY bookcase, for all its admirable qualities, has never sensed its owner's melancholy and responded with a sympathetic head bump. The POANG chair offers physical comfort but remains emotionally unavailable, utterly indifferent to tears shed upon its cushioned surface. IKEA furniture's therapeutic contribution is purely passive: it exists, it functions, it does not judge.