Stuff that otherwise would end up in a landfill, yes. Mostly MCM stuff. If it can be rescued, she will do that. If it’s water damaged or dried out or otherwise maimed? Why not?
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Plunger?
Snake?
One of those little plastic sticks with the barbs?
Those first two have plenty of hammer heft, or a stick. The last one, still a hammer for sufficiently small things that need pounding. 
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We took a trip to Costa Rica (just as covid was hitting). Sure there were the cool animals, but what truely amazing to me was the gorgeous hardwoods used in all the doors, the furniture. Centuries old grandmother fig tree turned into a dining room table, mohagany doors in our very simple room.
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I think there is a middle ground…
Interior Define - Frame Construction
“Our frames are made with kiln-dried,* solid wood that provide for exceptionally sturdy, long-lasting furniture pieces. We use Carb 2 compliant engineered wood to further reinforce the hardwood frame on the sides and back of our pieces. This durable material is comprised of layers of laminated hardwood. Our frames are joined with corner blocks, heavy-duty staples and industrial-strength craftsman’s glue. All frames are backed by our 10 year limited frame warranty, applicable to the original owner and original delivery address only.”
Crate and Barrel - Construction
"Frame is benchmade with hardwood that’s kiln-dried to prevent warping. Durable, independently tested, spring-up Flexolator foundation designed to support cushions and eliminate sagging. Soy-based polyfoam seat cushions wrapped in fiber-down blend and encased in downproof ticking. Fiber-down blend back cushions encased in downproof ticking. Made in USA of Domestic and Imported Materials
Room and Board - what to look for
"Well-built sofas are constructed with durable hardwood frames that won’t sag over time. We use kiln-dried engineered hardwood in our upholstered-piece frames for lasting durability. Often used for structural beams, this hardwood is made of thin layers of solid wood pressed together to prevent warping. Also, kiln-drying removes moisture, minimizing seasonal expansion and contraction to resist any cracking.
We reinforce every joint in our frames for added stability. Precision-cut parts interlock like puzzle pieces and are reinforced with eco-friendly glues, screws or staples and corner blocks. This ensures the interior components of our sofas remain strong for many years.
A great sofa is assembled with high-quality materials by skilled craftspeople. We manufacture more than 90% of our furniture and decor in America using quality U.S. and imported materials. Look for the link on each sofa product page to see who makes it and where."
Be a responsible consumer - research your purchases. Learn a little about materials and construction. Or… hire an interior designer! We’re not that expensive, it’ll pay off in the long run. Plan on spending more money for products that last, save for large purchases and take care of your things once they are in your possession. In a capitalist economy the consumer does bear some responsibility.
At age 42 I have only purchased four sofas in my adult life (three of which I still own and use) - the first one was cheap crap, I didn’t know any better… but I learned. The second was a warehouse sale DWR sofa - it was expensive for a recent college grad but 20 years later its still in use and I went 18 years before I bought another one. The third was Interior Define and the fourth Pottery Barn and they are both still in flawless condition.
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Saw that in Honduras as well. Where we would use pine, they used tropical hardwoods. Because they were cheap and available. Just like pine for us.
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In 2015 I had to patch up the cat damage to my first couch. None of the charities would take it in the scratched condition.
There was plenty of donor fabric in the arm protectors to replace the damaged pieces. In the end we gave it to a friend my wife had worked with.
I doubt that the economy couches come with any arm protection.
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I was like “What, 1000$? Of course it’s cheap crap!”. We paid 4000$ for our sofa, and 1500$ for each of our armchairs, pre-pandemic prices, from a reputable fancy reseller that imports high-quality stuff.
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The best sofa and loveseat I ever had cost $900 for the pair in 2013. They lasted 8 years, we only got rid of them when we downsized. They were very comfortable and withstood 7 years of at-home dog boarding.
I find that sofas, like clothes, are a case where price and durability are only occasionally, and very loosely, correlated.
Also, most sofas, regardless of price, are crap because they’re extremely uncomfortable to sit or lie on. I don’t care how durable it is if it can’t perform its most basic function.
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I like to goof off, but if anyone would actually like to learn to make furniture, Rex Krueger runs a great YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger He has a course on bootstrapping yourself into woodworking with about a $40 initial outlay, if I recall correctly. Shows you how to make a stool first. Later you learn how to make a low, Roman-style workbench. Videos on how to find and refurbish old hand tools - what to look for and what to avoid. A sofa may be out of your reach now, but you can get there if you want.
Christopher Schwarz, Paul Sellers, and Rex Krueger all have great courses - either books or video or both - to help get started and overcome problems as a beginning woodworker. I believe that it was Christopher Schwarz who went to Europe and examined hundreds of years of art to learn about historical woodworking. Since the story of Jesus is that he was a carpenter, artists for hundreds of years painted and drew woodworking and furniture making scenes, inadvertently documenting the craft. Anyway, I babble.
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Brackets? That must be extra fancy.
My current living room couch (which I hate) is literally pressboard, with the joints butted up against each other, and a handful staples tying them together.
The “fancy” joints might have some fabric tape with the staples.
There isn’t a screw or miter in place anywhere to be found.
Needless to say, the arms about just about ready to fall off, some of the seat backs have ripped the staples and flop against the wall.
This piece of **** was also about $1600 when I bought it.
I’ve gone shopping. I haven’t found anything that is decently built, or looks good for any amount of money at all. At this point I’m just about ready to sit on the floor rather than have a couch.
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Memory foam is not a great foam for seating applications in my experience (ymmv), it deforms significantly with body heat, making for a hot posterior and a hard sitting surfaces as the foam compresses. My preference is a 2.5lb – 3.5lb density open-cell polyurathane foam. lots of support, and you can put a thin layer of something softer over it for a plusher feel.
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Yep. One of the three workbenches in my shop/office area I built out of 4x4, 2x4 lumber, plywood and MDF. It’s ugly as sin, weighs as much as I do, and I could probably park close to a ton of material on it before the casters on it fail. 
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Westerns have given old furniture a bad name, what with all those chairs splintering like rotten twigs when used to clobber people in bar fights. In reality, if you got whacked with a well-built vintage solid wood chair, you would know it… or probably never. 
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For the sake of completeness, you can use it as fuel in a hybrid rocket motor.
But that’s
a) also burning it to generate heat and
b) not particular efficient, which is why it hasn’t caught on.
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I find that some of the furniture enshittification is also about generational changes. Maybe a lot of us don’t want to have to worry about something lasting generations anymore. It can be a lot of pressure.
I have a nice mix of antiques inherited from my great-grandmother, and ikea stuff. I was only in a position to inherit (really i bought it, but at a family discount) the furniture once I was nearing my 40s and had a house, not a rental apartment. This was 16 years after she passed and I only got the furniture through a lucky coincidence.
It’s lovely stuff and I love having it, but no way could I have afforded it sooner. The purchase price, sure, but not the burden. The thought of cramming it into the small apartments I was living in, moving almost every year, or paying to store it somewhere until some unknown future date then move it all to where I ended up?
And then there’s the minor burden of having it in the house. I like my house to be warm and sometimes messy with people and kids and animals comfortable to be there. Sometimes the antique or expensive stuff makes if feel like you have to be so careful about stuff that really doesn’t matter in the long run.
Ecologically it’s not great, but if people are opting for stuff they know won’t make it through their next move because they don’t want to move it, I think that’s valid. Rather than judge that choice, we could work to pass better laws around manufacturing and recyclability.
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I grew up watching tailors who were able to recover their own sofas but was not taught the skills of the trade. What I do recall is how much work it was and what angry angry people they were while doing it so I’m not inclined to make it my hobby and begin destroying the furniture I have while I learn. My makeshift patches are enough for me to know my skills are not up to the task.
I hunt for ok build quality used and new, and hold onto old furniture that I have which is good still where I can, but on the soft furnishings I think this is how it’s going to be. It makes more sense really to move towards disposability and plan around making that less harmful.
I could even go for it if there was a sort of simple well built frame you could order and then re-cover from a kit… something designed to be easy to repair/re-cover.
People are afraid to even take free sofas because of bedbugs around here.
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Ikeas sofas are good quality considering what they cost. Furniture in the price bracket just above are usually the worst both in terms of design as well as quality.
We paid about 5400$ for our sofa from the swedish manufacturer Norrgavel. It will probably outlast us, which is good because it cost a lot of money (it was not expensive though). Most of our other furniture is second hand and a lot of it was cheap.
Furniture is very much an area where it is expensive to be poor as we say in Sweden.
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What is “amazOMG”? The DDG search engine doesn’t seem to know.
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