Custom bedroom wardrobe or standard furniture?

Of course, it depends on what you want to do with your furniture. Our Pax are 10 years old and have been moved several times. They are still great, very high quality and sturdy.

Back then, Pax was of higher quality. We also bought 4.5m of it for our dressing room with all the bells and whistles. They are of okay quality, but I wouldn't call them very valuable and stable. It's okay for the price, but there are definitely significant differences compared to the carpenter's stuff. The extra cost wasn't worth it to us, but I can understand choosing it with a bigger budget.

Our table is also from the carpenter. The Pax fits really well and matches the rest of the furniture. We have a different bedroom in mind, but our wallet is hesitating. If we treat ourselves, the matching wardrobe will come too, and the carpenter will have to do his part there as well. I would never spend that much money on a children's room. On the one hand, children do not exactly handle things carefully, and on the other hand, the requirements change a lot—from baby to student. By not carefully, I do not mean unruly, deliberate destruction. The wrong painting mat is enough, and the marker has left its mark permanently. It is difficult to find timeless yet modern furniture. Eventually, cheap or high-quality furniture becomes just as old-fashioned as the wall unit in Gelsenkirchen Baroque style (dark oak).

1. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with upbringing, hello? I take the liberty to say that I was raised quite well, even stricter than I am with our offspring. But even I had a whittling phase around age 7 (?), and then my desk had all these notches on the front of the top. Well, I had to live with that for the next 3 years, during which I found it ugly myself, but with the next furniture I was more careful.

2. Pax: was definitely better quality back then. Our first maple Paxes have solid drawer fronts and sides, as well as shelves glued together from leftover pieces, but solid parts. The piece we bought later was no longer available in maple, only uh "oak effect white glazed." Yes, and there it’s no longer solid; everything is veneered or foiled. So the quality has clearly gone down. Nevertheless, we will still expand our bedroom wardrobe by one part. For now. If in 5 or 10 years we might want something else – it will probably be something from the carpenter. But other furniture is more important for now.

Maybe a question of upbringing?

Who raises their children to just break everything? Of course, we have always explained to our children that everything costs a lot of money, you have to work a long time for it, etc., and we ourselves are also very careful with all things. Nevertheless, it doesn’t always work out as you imagine, and children simply don’t handle things as carefully as you would like. That’s why I prefer to buy cheap things for the children and don’t get too upset when something breaks or gets scratched. I think as long as children don’t earn their own money yet, they lack a bit of understanding for the value of things.

Best regards
Sabine

but maybe not everyone wants Ikea furniture or "the usual" from the furniture store everywhere. I find furniture stores really borderline too. Either they have cheap stuff that is badly made, poorly veneered, with many visible edges, and then too expensive for that, or nice stuff, high-quality craftsmanship, which then is incredibly expensive.

As already mentioned, we will end up at 1200€ / m, including drawers at the bottom, doors at the top, shelves etc. etc. When I look at the good pieces in the furniture store - I’m at 600€ for a small sideboard. Or then 4000 € for a "living wall," which consists of 3 airily arranged parts, in which I can’t fit any of the stuff that has to go in there. And for system furniture (Sudbrock for example) I’d be at 7k plus AND wouldn’t even have it the way I wanted.

We are currently facing exactly that problem again, so far we always ended up at Ikea because the price/performance ratio is right there. But currently we can’t find anything decent for our hallway and are looking elsewhere - but everything is so outrageously overpriced, I am just not willing to spend 700€ on a small dresser just because "Hans Wurst Design" laminated it in black.

Does anyone have tips for Ikea-like stores? So, good quality at a reasonable price? Has anyone, for example, simply built a dresser/lowboard themselves? It’s basically just a few boards and hinges. Designed in CAD, have the drilling done, screw it together?