There's this thin sheet of wood or cardboard on the back of cabinets or drawers usually. The bit that separates from the back of your closet when you stuff too much stuff into it. The bit you might have to hammer to make it stick to the furniture again.
What is it called? The one on the back of my drawer got wet and I rip it off and chucked it out, but obviously I would need a replacement. I have been googling different combination of words and I have not been lucky. What is that piece called so that I can buy it off eBay and do it myself. Please lads.
>>2243 MDF is fibreboad - basically what Ikea furniture is made of.
Hardboard is similar to MDF but harder, which is why it's used for the thinner sheets like above.
WPB plywood is plywood that's treated to make it suitable to use outdoors.
Chipboard is ugly-A-F and a pain to work with, it's the sort of stuff you'd put on the floor of your loft to walk on.
Those thin sheets of hardwood or MDF at the back of cabinets always aggravates me. As has been said, they tend to come loose, and even if you put a staple gun to them, they have a tendency to come off yet again.
I've got a solid English oak livingroom cupboard from my granddad from around the 1950s, and the back of it is solid oak just like all the rest of it.
They very literally don't make them like they used to anymore. Then again, back in the old days, you would buy one assortment of decent furniture once in your life, typically when you got married, and that furniture would stay with you until the day you died and left it to your children. Nowadays, most people buy new furniture every five to ten years and throw the old pieces away, and therefore it doesn't have to be as sturdy anymore as it used to be.
Shame though. The old way was among other things much more ecological. Also because the wood for your furniture was usually sourced locally.
>>2246 >They very literally don't make them like they used to anymore. Then again, back in the old days, you would buy one assortment of decent furniture once in your life, typically when you got married, and that furniture would stay with you until the day you died and left it to your children. Nowadays, most people buy new furniture every five to ten years and throw the old pieces away, and therefore it doesn't have to be as sturdy anymore as it used to be.
You get what you a pay for.
It is still possible to buy solid wood furniture on the high-street, but the prices run into thousands. My picture is the obvious one, but there are plenty of more upmarket/smaller production run retailers around. There are also many people around the country producing furniture by hand, but finding something from them takes persistence and luck.
>It is still possible to buy solid wood furniture on the high-street, but the prices run into thousands.
And that is also what people paid back then, in relative terms. Except kitting yourself out with furniture was a lifetime investment. Both because you didn't have mass-produced, carry-home flat packs as an alternative, and because poor people in particular could only afford to own a handful of furniture pieces at all. A well-made sideboard, cabinet or cupboard was then often passed down the generations because it would just have been too expensive to replace. And because it simply lasted that long. Cost efficiency down to the last penny and obsolescence were no primary considerations for 19th and mid-20th century cabinet makers.
If you want solid wood furniture then B&M Bargains is surprisingly decent. The drawers on the bedside cabinets are a little on the small side, but other than that it's winner winner chicken dinner.
>>2251 >They'd know how to repair them, too. Which helps.
To date, I haven't ever found anything that I couldn't repair with VHB tape. Except anything made of PE or PP, or several other low-surface-energy plastics.
We've lost an entire culture of fixing and repairing things. This goes both for furniture and technical appliances. When was the last time you had a TV repair man in? Or somebody to fix your washing machine?
All these things that make up a modern household nowadays are thrown away and not repaired, except for pensioners who still call repair people in.
Then again, similar to furniture, all these household items are cheaply mass produced, and having them fixed will often very nearly exceed their replacement value. A livingroom-sized colour television set in the 70s to early 80s would set you back the equivalent of what would today be around £1,000 to £2,000. This weekend in Tesco's, I saw a Samsung 40'' flat screen TV for £299. For somebody like me who grew up with late 80s and early 90s technology, this is just mind blowing.
If you paid £300 for a washing machine and it breaks after five years, you're still doing fairly well - it only cost you £1.15 a week. Shelling out £150 to get the drum bearings replaced doesn't make much sense compared to buying a new one. Modern products aren't particularly more difficult to repair, but manufactured goods have become much cheaper compared to the labour costs of a repair.
Phone repair is thriving, but only because they're relatively expensive devices that break quite often. Paying £120 to replace the cracked screen on your nearly-new iPhone makes a good deal of sense.
If it's a brick wall, you need to use masonry screws that are long enough to go through the plaster and anchor into solid brick. If it's a plasterboard wall, you need to screw into the wooden studs. You might be able to get away with a snap toggle or an expanding wall anchor going straight into the plasterboard, but I wouldn't risk it for anything heavy. If in doubt, get yourself a stud finder. If you don't immediately point it at yourself and go "beep beep beep, looks like we've found a stud", you're a better man than me.
I'll add my own random tip for attaching things to walls.
If you have a plastered wall, and the plaster is old or poor quality making a bit to crumbly for a wall-plug to feel safe, a bit of no-more-nails in the hole before you put the wall plug in works wonders.
(You can also get a special product for this purpose call gripfill, but for anything light to medium duty no more nails is good enough.)
>If you paid £300 for a washing machine and it breaks after five years, you're still doing fairly well - it only cost you £1.15 a week. Shelling out £150 to get the drum bearings replaced doesn't make much sense compared to buying a new one.
I am actually looking at replacing the bearings on my washing machine at the moment. I think I paid £500 for it back in the day. It's a 15-year-old Bosch washing machine, and it has given me no trouble at all during all that time (the Germans know their stuff when it comes to household appliances), except now the bearings are really beginning to fail and this means I can't do laundry anymore in my flat after a certain time of the evening, because the noise would wake up my neighbours. I am good with repairs, haven't changed bearings on a washing machine, but decades of experience fixing my own cars should mean I am prepared for that kind of of job.
Anyway, I see no reason to throw out an otherwise good washing machine just because the bearings have gone bad. But I will do it myself, so that should knock an easy £100 off the price of having this kind of work carried out professionally. Somebody who is clueless about this kind of thing might indeed fare better just getting a new machine altogether instead.
The MDF backboard is to stop the actual solid wood panels cracking under natural expansion and contraction in the case of changing temperatures in the room in which it's placed. It's not a penny-pinching tactic — it's an evolution of the design.
The backs of good quality cabinets (and the bases of drawers) would be fitted into a slightly loose groove, with a few millimetres of space at either end for expansion.
Telling the difference between a plasterboard and brick wall is perfectly straightforward - you just knock on the wall to see if it's hollow.
The stud finder detects differences in density. If you wave it along a plasterboard wall, it'll beep when there's a wooden beam behind the plasterboard. You want to screw into the wooden beam rather than the plasterboard, because the wood is far stronger. Most stud finders will also detect cables and pipes, which you obviously don't want to drill into.
