The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.
One more step in this direction and suddenly even kitchen cabinets are separate pieces, carried up and down and in and out and around tight corners. No longer attached to the wall. Just another freestanding cabinet, there in the kitchen, with some dust, two coins, a random piece from a toy and a few dead bugs behind it. So sometimes you’ll feel like you have to pull the whole thing away from the wall and clean behind it. And you’ll have to remove all the dishes first, becouse the MDF panels and their connections are not strong enough to witstand all that weight while being pulled and twisted and turned. And even then you’ll notice a bit more wobble than last time. So maybe you’ll cut a rough match with the baseboard and screw it into the wall when you put it back. Or maybe you won’t, either way it still won’t be good.
When you end up moving a few years later, depending on your financial situation, you’ll remove the terrible cabinet snd either toss it or bring the poorly built half-mangled half-mess still technically usable thing to the new apartment. An apartment someone else just pulled a kitchen cabinet and everything else out of. And it was hard and annoying for them, too. And just like you, they’re not happy either.
The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.
The fact is, the average person owns so much more now than they did at any other point in history. In the 19th century the average American home was about 400-800 sq feet with Victorian mansions pushing 2000 sq feet (also worth noting that the concept of a bedroom is only about 200 years old, and the option of kids not sharing rooms is only about 50 years old)
I’d also argue that housing becoming a commodity is also a factor. With rapidly increasing rents, rental properties as an investment and non-present landlords one is forced to move in order to maintain their lifestyle far more frequently than they should
Honestly in this historical context, I feel like there’s some wisdom to the small home and minimalism movements, primarily in that it returns to a more sustainable lifestyle in our urban modern lives
I don’t think it is so much a thing of today unless you mean for the last few decades at least. Kitchens in particular are very weird since people just rip them out out of spite it seems just so the person renting the place next will have to buy a new one.
I don’t know of people bringing kitchen cabinetry during moves either, just the occasional kitchen remodeling.
What I went on about was the logical extreme of this kind of moving behavior. The kitchen and bathroom are the two places left in a house where things tend to stay put, built in.
What taladar said about a lot of Germans tearing out kitchens for no reason sounds absolutely ridiculous and I really hope that stops.
I am in Germany. Here people are very weird about kitchens when renting (medium to long-term, not with stuff like student apartments) and often do rip out their kitchen even if they don’t plan on keeping it unless the next renter pays them for it, if anything that got a bit better in the last few years as people have been raising awareness how wasteful that is.
The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.
One more step in this direction and suddenly even kitchen cabinets are separate pieces, carried up and down and in and out and around tight corners. No longer attached to the wall. Just another freestanding cabinet, there in the kitchen, with some dust, two coins, a random piece from a toy and a few dead bugs behind it. So sometimes you’ll feel like you have to pull the whole thing away from the wall and clean behind it. And you’ll have to remove all the dishes first, becouse the MDF panels and their connections are not strong enough to witstand all that weight while being pulled and twisted and turned. And even then you’ll notice a bit more wobble than last time. So maybe you’ll cut a rough match with the baseboard and screw it into the wall when you put it back. Or maybe you won’t, either way it still won’t be good.
When you end up moving a few years later, depending on your financial situation, you’ll remove the terrible cabinet snd either toss it or bring the poorly built half-mangled half-mess still technically usable thing to the new apartment. An apartment someone else just pulled a kitchen cabinet and everything else out of. And it was hard and annoying for them, too. And just like you, they’re not happy either.
The fact is, the average person owns so much more now than they did at any other point in history. In the 19th century the average American home was about 400-800 sq feet with Victorian mansions pushing 2000 sq feet (also worth noting that the concept of a bedroom is only about 200 years old, and the option of kids not sharing rooms is only about 50 years old)
I’d also argue that housing becoming a commodity is also a factor. With rapidly increasing rents, rental properties as an investment and non-present landlords one is forced to move in order to maintain their lifestyle far more frequently than they should
Honestly in this historical context, I feel like there’s some wisdom to the small home and minimalism movements, primarily in that it returns to a more sustainable lifestyle in our urban modern lives
I don’t think it is so much a thing of today unless you mean for the last few decades at least. Kitchens in particular are very weird since people just rip them out out of spite it seems just so the person renting the place next will have to buy a new one.
Not sure where you live but where I live no one takes the kitchen cabinets when they move (us here.)
I don’t know of people bringing kitchen cabinetry during moves either, just the occasional kitchen remodeling.
What I went on about was the logical extreme of this kind of moving behavior. The kitchen and bathroom are the two places left in a house where things tend to stay put, built in.
What taladar said about a lot of Germans tearing out kitchens for no reason sounds absolutely ridiculous and I really hope that stops.
I am in Germany. Here people are very weird about kitchens when renting (medium to long-term, not with stuff like student apartments) and often do rip out their kitchen even if they don’t plan on keeping it unless the next renter pays them for it, if anything that got a bit better in the last few years as people have been raising awareness how wasteful that is.