Building His Own Cheap Furniture Made Him Value It More

In the middle of his first night living alone, Sahil Bloom woke up convinced someone was shaking his bed as a prank.

He was half asleep in the dark, and he leaned over to check underneath. After a few seconds the shaking stopped, and he fell back asleep.

It is a clear case of what behavioral scientists call the IKEA effect, the finding that people place much higher value on things they build themselves. In one test, people who put together a simple flat packed storage box offered 63% more to keep it than people who were handed an already assembled box.

Bloom had signed the lease in 2014 on a 400-square-foot studio in Palo Alto, California. He was starting his first job, working long hours in finance, and the place was close to work. The rent was high for what he got, but he was proud to pay it with his own money and live on his own.

On the morning of Saturday, Aug. 23, the day he got the keys, he drove to IKEA, the chain that sells low cost furniture in flat boxes with picture instructions for home assembly. He picked out a bed, a dresser, a small table, and one chair for about $350 total. Bloom says he is not handy, and he spent the rest of the day assembling it all, with some boards on crooked and some screws stripped.

That evening he ate dinner from a paper plate at the little table, grinning. It felt like "one of the most free moments of my life," Bloom said.

Then came the shaking in the night. When he woke the next morning, he found his phone full of worried messages from his parents. He learned a magnitude 6.0 quake had hit the area.

His first feeling was not fear. He looked around, saw that everything he had built was still upright, and felt pride. He recalled thinking, "I built that. Earthquake-proof."

The feeling fits the research. In 2011, behavioral scientists Michael Norton, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Mochon asked people to fold paper frogs and cranes, then say what they were worth. The makers put a price about five times higher than strangers did, and rated their own work as good as an expert's. The box test gave the same lesson about self made goods.

That first set of furniture is long gone. Bloom has moved on to nicer brands, as he puts it, and pays professionals to assemble them, which he said is "probably for the best." But he still calls those crooked first pieces the "best, most highly valued furniture I've ever owned," Bloom said.