Furniture

I have just been awarded some discretionary carers personal budget funding for a new settee because my son keeps breaking furniture. He's not breaking it in anger, he's big, autistic and does lots of rocking back and forth and so on. It's really annoying that lots of wooden furniture is so overpriced and poorly built, especially that Ikea shite. I bought a single seater chair from them and it lasted 6 hours. I solved the problem of him breaking countless beds by getting a reinforced steel bed frame, which is actually cheaper than the wooden divan bed bases. It made me realise what a scam the bed manufacturing industry is. Staple together some low quality timber, put a sheet of cardboard on top - then sell that piece of crap for £400.

I went through nearly £600 worth of swivel chairs last year, he broke 4 of them! The final solution that he didn't manage to break was a rather scruffy and scuffed looking but solid and dependable 20 year old one I picked up from a charity shop for £16. I swear to god I'd rather just screw some wooden pallets together and put a cushion on top than waste another penny on substandard furniture.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQFyHJW0RVUtpds1jZ7ap1bJzPWdpYwbILr_OYkf31xFw7ekIwg

I'm just waiting for a grant to be paid into my bank to order this sofa. I didn't want one with cushions on the back because they end up getting permanently squashed and misshaped. The customer services woman didn't give me any sales bs or try to steer me towards a more expensive item and said we buy them from a Chinese company that manufactures them and they have a good rep and don't make any substandard crap. It's got a reassuringly high weight limit rating and doesn't look horrible. Briefly I did entertain the idea of getting 2 cheaper sofas from the £600 grant, but remembered the crap sofa I got from Argos that was literally broken the first day it arrived.

i've had furniture wear out over the last couple of years and yes, the bed frames were splintery wood with a cardboard top (the cardboard went when they got wet from a leak) and the sofa was chipboard, staples and foam (20+ year old foam deteriorated and where the staples were applied too close to the edge of the chipboard the chipboard has just crumbled).

the new bed, i don't trust the slats on it, fear they'd just snap if you're not distributing the weight evenly (i had one break on assembly, badly laminated). the new sofa is a "two seater" but only if the two are slim and/or friendly.

the extremely poor build quality of your average, quite pricey divan bed base in the UK is scandalous.

the good thing with reinforced steel bed bases is they are cheap and fold up if you are moving and have storage space under them. And will last a lifetime unless you are an olympic standard 10 times a day sex god, and then it would still take some *doing* to break the steel trellis that supports the mattress! And the divan fabric always ends up looking really shabby and worn out, even just after a year. And they are a pain in the arse to lug up the stairs.