For dishcloths/washcloths I usually do “Grandma’s favorite” it’s simple but depending on the cotton can be soft or scrubby. You can find it anywhere but here’s a link:
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I’m in the middle of moving my craft lab to a different room, so have been purging as I go. I have another box to donate to the creative reuse store! And I have it in my car to take today! I think that have a box at the ready to put things in encourages me to actually do it right then instead of thinking, “I can pass this along,” then putting it back into its bin for future TheMistressT to deal with.
I have put my old Ikea Expedit back together for the new space, but can’t get too far with stocking it until I get to Ikea to buy several inserts in a couple of weeks when I visit my mom. I just hope they have all the ones I want in stock. Out of curiosity about shipping costs, I looked up what it would cost for just part of my list. Approximately $150 worth of stuff would cost $349 to ship! What the actual…!?
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oh my god, that’s some pricey shipping!
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Ikea is definitely not shipping friendly. Everytime I have explored the option it was like that- twice+ the cost of the products! No thanks.
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I almost pushed the purchase button on some handprinted fabric I loved. The total for the fabric was about $70, but the shipping was $43 and the tariff was nearly $50. The fabric was relatively inexpensive so I still might do it, but it irks me that those two things cost more than the product. 50% tariff?
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Tarrifs are insane. I was looking up buying some bike parts from overseas for a customer a couple weeks ago and the tarrifs just make everything completely impractical!
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Winning! 
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Seems like luring people to the store instead of shopping online is Ikea’s global policy! It’s the same here. Delivery really only makes financial sense if you’re buying half a house worth of furniture or an entire kitchen or something.
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I understand why they want that - Ikea is ripe for impulse purchases. The closest Ikea to me is an 8.5 hour drive (Boise, Idaho). In summer. I’m going to the second closest, because I need to go to Portland anyway. Ikea does have a pickup spot in Montana which would have only cost $10, but it’s a 5.5 hour drive (in summer) over the majority of part of the Rocky Mountains that are in Montana. AND they didn’t have my whole list available to ship, so at least a 12 hour trip in total for not everything, plus the cost of fuel and maybe staying over night just for safer driving conditions.
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Dang. The nearest Ikea is about 20 minutes away and I still find that drive a bummer, lol. We hardly ever go there. Being in an urban setting, it’s easy enough to find most of the Ikea stuff I want on marketplace for cheap, and often the older versions are a darn sight better quality too. Recently we picked up 2 identical Kallax shelves, one weighed about 5 lbs, the other felt like 50! Card Board and cardboard, lol.
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I recently set up my old Expedit - Kallax’s predecessor and it’s HEAVY. 250 pounds if I remember from when I bought it. What I want to get at Ikea is several Kallax inserts to make my storage tidier or at least tidier looking. When looking for some info on the Expedit online (before actually reassembling mine) I came upon a Reddit thread where everyone was talking about how you can’t move your Ikea shelves (like move house) because it just falls apart. And I was baffled. I’ve move this 5x5 Expedit to 3 houses! Then I realized none of these people were disassembling their stuff! Seems obvious you would with the big things, at least. People were also commenting on how the old stuff, especially the Expedite/Kallax was so much higher quality. Anyway, I’m just trying to use what I have and add to it.
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Oops! I came here to say that I delivered a big, heavy box to the creative reuse store today and even thought I looked around… I didn’t buy anything! WOO!
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We made the mistake in one move not to disassemble some expensive teak bookcases. Of course they buckled. We managed to get new bracing and fixed them, but after that, we always took them apart. We still have two in use that we bought in 1980!
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I’m 50-50 with disassembling, if I can get away with not doing, I will try! A lot of ikea never goes back together as well the next time.
I found inserts on FB for cheaper than new but then I decided to make those foam-core drawers instead. Not the prettiest option but only I see them.
Contractor’s coming this week, I gotta clean out the basement by Wed!
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There aren’t really any Ikea used pieces around here since we’re so far from a store. I don’t have much experience with the furniture, actually. I think this Expedit might be the only furniture I have ever had from there. I’ve have several hardgoods or such, though. Portland only got a store a few years before I moved.
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We have a bunch of Expedit / Kallax shelves, we got most of them used and some have been moved 5 times or more. We never took those apart because they’re pretty solid / stable. We just carried them down the stairs, wrapped in a quilt, and put them upright in the van. I have to say our moves have always been done by a bunch of experienced touring musicians, so they know all about carefully loading a van in a way that nothing gets damaged. It’s true that there’s a lot of difference in weight between each of them, and we bought a new one a few years ago for the new version of our house and that one weights much less.
We got drawer insets for that one and the drawers we use every single day, like the sock drawers, need to be reassembled every now and then, the front comes loose. I have older drawer insets in my craft room for fabric, I don’t use them as much but they seem a bit more solid too. Adding some glue to those drawers has been on my to-do list for a while.
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My 5x5 Expedit is not really moveable when put together. It’s scoot-able, but weighs over 225 lbs/100 kgs and has always been either up- or downstairs. I think even just the physical size would prevent it from going out of the houses it’s been in because of how the staircases are. I can see not taking apart a smaller one.
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Yours is massive! Most of ours are 4 x 2, and it wasn’t easy to get them upstairs, they’re already pretty heavy. Our current house has a quarter turn staircase and the weight made it a challenge to lift it high enough to make the turn. In my craft room I’ve stacked a few different sizes on top of each other and connected them and also added a back.
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I have two big leftover pieces of a heavy velvet fabric. I bought two half-full rolls of fabric and these were the leftover pieces on each roll. I think 1.5-ish yards each. It’s too heavy to use for clothes and I don’t need any kind of pillows anywhere.
Has anyone ever tried this kind of material as a quilt backing? I remembered the other day that we used to have a road play rug when I was a kid and we got so much use out of it. In our house the rule was no toys allowed beyond the rug, so we’d play there with all sorts of toys. The animals, dolls as well as the toy cars had homes on the rug. I figured that might be a fun gift for my future niece in a few years and the two pieces of velvet could be the front and the back of the rug. A DIY rug wouldn’t have to be the classic road pattern, it could bee adapted to the kid’s future interests, city streets, farm, fairytale castle, you name it.
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I think it would make a good, solid and comfortable backing for some sort of play mat! Is it washable?