I have a piece that I put my TV and DVD player on that I have been wanting to replace. Also my dining room table was a compromise because I haven't been able to find one I like. Both are Ikea placeholders.

My bedroom furniture is still the 'first apartment' stuff from craigslist that my husband and I bought when we first moved in together....I need to redo the whole bedroom, but I just haven't had the time.
Also, our computer desk in the main area of our living space is a hand-me-down from mom and dad. It does the job really well but it's so ugly...I need a nice computer desk about 42" long that can accommodate a PC (tower preferably behind a cabinet door)!!

I think that my living room except for the sofa is a place holder! It is next - give me a break though as I and just about finished with a kitchen and dining room redo! Living room looks hideous but I ran out of steam - and money for now.

Yes, but only if I absolutely can't live without it. My mattress has been on the bedroom floor for years now, because I can't find a bed frame I like. ;) My computer desk...now THAT is a placeholder. (:

Um....pretty much 75% of the furniture I own could be considered "placeholder". I'm 27, paying off student loans / college credit cards and while I have a good job and salary I just am not in a place to buy an apartment full of furniture I love. BUT, I'm saving and planning and looking forward to the day I get to "complete" a room furnished exactly how I would like. Of course I am still proud of my home and feel no shame in having Ikea/Target/Hand-Me-Downs in each room.

I have this exact night stand. /blush. Its going as soon as i can find something I like. The thing that is even worse is my bed is very low, and the nightstand is well... about a foot higher. I have to get up to set my water down :(

I wish I were holding the place for my future nightstand as well as that! I just have an end table from Urban Outfitters, that isn't big enough and has no drawer. It is sad. Good nightstands are hard to find though!

I have the same nights tand too. It really is that ugly. But my bed is actually extra high (Room & Board Parsons big pillow-top mattress), and its one of the few night stands that is high enough. My search for a replacement that I can afford continues.

When I saw those nightstands, I knew exactly why they were there. It's really hard to find nice nightstands -- especially if you like antiques. Antiques generally have only one tiny drawer or no drawer at all.

Right now, I have Ikea nightstands, covered with tablecloths to disguise them. I have to lift up the tablecloth to get into the drawers. Not convenient, but I couldn't bear to look at the particleboard in my bedroom.

I have lots of 'placeholder furniture' but to be honest I think it makes me more complacent. I've stopped buying stuff I'm not in love with. Id rather go without then settle for less.

Currently my bedside table is one that I found in the trash. it has no drawers and doesn't match anything else in the room. It does the job for the time being, but I would like to get something that matches my vintage art deco bedroom furniture.

funny - I saw their apartment the other day and I thought what an eye sore - with their sensibilities, they must be placeholders - that's why I did not say anything. Glad I held my peace :-) My entire bedroom is a placeholder. My bed is a cheap platform that I am trying to keep until I have a small fortune to buy a onto bed by bensen and a superdupper mattress for it.... my nightstands and the dressers tooo..... hmmmm I better win the lotto soon :-)

I consider all the junk furniture I was given when needing to furnish my first apartment a couple years ago as "placeholder." Bedside tables included. They're rather gross, actually.

Lighting fixtures! All different kinds from lamps to the entry way. We live in an apartment, and until recently felt like it wasn't worth it, but now we're thinking lets enjoy our space and really live in it.

Our dining room table came with the apartment and I hate it, but since we didn't already have our own table and spending money on a new one when we have more pressing things to buy seems silly. So once we've got all the other "needs" out of the way and have some money for "wants", hopefully it will get replaced.

I have a pedestal table base that I found in the As-Is section of IKEA years ago for $12, and a round glass top from an old patio set that I cleaned up and backpainted as my dining table...
...as soon as I acquire a pedestal table that I like in the size that I need, these are going out on the balcony.

I don't see anything wrong with the 2 bedside tables. I would spray paint them silver and add mirrors on top. Maybe some kind of applique to the front.
I have an ikea coffee table as a place holder furniture. I plan on adding a collage of family pictures on top and placing glass on top.

also, i thought ikea stood for placeholder in swedish?

Until recently, at least 60% of our furniture was a placeholder.

Placeholder sofa, armchair, side tables (still a placeholder item), file cabinet for bedside table, ugly metal bed frame, dumpster dining table... *sigh*

But we're getting there.

I just find it interesting that there is a discussion going on in another post about whether or not you invite people over if your home is not perfectly the way you want it. House tours here are sort of the same thing. But people can still be pretty ruthless.

Anyway, to answer the question, I tend to be one who would rather go without something (even if it's a necessity!) if I can't find exactly what I want to fill the purpose. But I know that I'm silly, and people tell me all the time. Although I wouldn't judge anyone else for choosing something inexpensive to fill their needs until the right piece came along.

Hah, my kitchen table is a slightly hand-me-down that needs to be replaced, the nightstands however, I'm not sure if 'contact paper covered shoeboxes that I use to store art supplies stacked next to the bed that I use to make the alarm clock reachable' counts as 'furniture'.

Coffehr: Love love love that idea. I'm not handy and could end up spraypainting myself silver, but I'll try it!

I have been married almost 3 years and still have placeholder furniture. We move with the military a lot and I don't want "nice" furniture ruined from constant moving. I have slowly started to replace items with things we want when I find them but I am in no rush to finish. I would rather take the time and spend money on what I want and have it last.

We have a few of items (a rolling cart for the office printer and a bathroom cabinet repurposed as a liquor cabinet). I still need to make some slip covers for our living room chairs and reupholster some dining chair seats, but for the most part, I like most of what we have. I love Craigslist for allowing us to buy nicer furniture than we can afford new.

I have an awful hand-me-down dining table and cheap ikea chairs. But, since I intend to move to the East Coast (I live on the West) next year, it seems impractical to buy something else I'll have to move. This way I can leave it behind and start fresh in a new place.

I am in the same boat with the guy who said 75% of his furniture is placeholder. I'm a student without much income. I have a couple things I really love. I love my antique dresser/vanity that I've had forever. I love some of the prints I have up. I love my art glass collection. But with the exception of my living room sofa and chair, I have not spent more than $100-ish on any one thing in my apartment. Everything but those two new pieces were hand me downs, found items, and thrift store/Craigslist/Ebay. I happen to like vintage furniture and flea markets and Craigslist, which is lucky because every once in a while you find something great. I've also had a lot of luck with sidewalk finds. But most of the furniture in my apartment, I would someday like to replace when I have the disposable income to do so. My most immediate placeholder items are my dining chairs. I bought a nicer table a few months ago at a thrift store but it didn't come with chairs, and the ones I have now are very cheap and don't go with the table. Just not sure what would look better for not much money because I can't just go out to the store and buy matching chairs. Would really like to replace them soon anyway. It would be nice to go into a full priced furniture store and be able to splurge on something beautiful. I'm just not there yet. In the meantime, I have to be creative and make the best of items that often aren't perfect. Which is part of the fun I guess.

It's been driving me nuts that I can't find the right MCM dresser to replace the particle board boxes my boyfriend and I call a TV stand and DVD shelf. I also have two comfortable but unattractive MCM chairs that I might be replacing with two gorgeous damask wing chairs tonight. However, unlike the particle board boxes, I won't be tossing the MCM chairs since I hope to reupholster them sometime and use them in another room.

In my 20s, I would have said that ALL of my furniture, mostly hand-me-downs, were "placeholders" until I had enough money to get new stuff that I chose myself. Now that I'm in 30s, I have chosen most of my big pieces of furniture but there are still plenty of things that are still placeholders.

This question goes along with that other post about a "perfect" house. If your house is a work-in-progress and thus not "perfect" then there are bound to be some placeholder items, maybe even whole rooms of them. Unless you have the time and money to (re-) design your entire house at once, I guess, but I wish I had that luxury.

My entire living room set and bedroom set are "placeholders". I bought them secondhand years ago when I moved to the city for my new job.

The bedroom set will become the guest room set in time, but for now, it does the job. It's basically an old, cheap solid wood set from the 50s and it's starting to show some wear and tear. It was a fantastic deal at the time ($200 free delivery from Craig's List), so I got my money's worth out of it.

I hate everything in my living room except for the loveseat and my dad's old la-z-boy. All super heavy oak and mdf furniture. I'm thinking about replacing the pieces one by one as I find something that interests me and fits my budget. I don't want the matchy-matchyness anymore. For example, I'm really digging this side table I found on thehungersite.com shop.

My bed is a placeholder, as well as my super-wobbly bedside table. Both were basically free and I'm moving next year, so I'm dealing with them for now.

My husband and I just bought a new bed but we're still using dressers and nightstands from our childhood furniture suites. Hopefully we can get something new after the holidays. Something simple from Ikea has to be better than the awful stuff we have now!

Every single thing in our house is placeholder except the bed and the TV =/

Oh yeah, and one lamp!

I too used to have those Ikea side tables and a drawer unit as well. I could not stand the clear plastic inserts on each drawer. To make it more pleasing to the eye, I went to Paper Source and bought some of thick decorated sheets of paper and covered the plastic inserts with those. It added some color to my bedroom and also was easy to mix and match and frequently change up. Since I couldn't afford buying new bedroom furniture at the time, I was at least able to have some fun with the pieces I had.

How privileged we are to consider some of our things placeholders!

I guess most of my furniture would be considered placeholder by most standards. I'd say nearly everything I own furniture wise cost me less than 600 total. Cheap or free, sure, but do I need to find a 1300 sofa to make my home worth spending time in? I'd like a larger dining room table and more chairs so that I can entertain more people, and eventually will need a nicer sofa, but no one who visited my home would complain for my lack of useful items or fault a lack of style.

Pretty much everything I own from Ikea (except my bookcases) are placeholder. But I bought most of it from craigslist so I won't feel guilty putting it back on craigslist when the time comes.

Yep. Bedside tables for me too. I redecorated our bedroom (you can see it at http://www.thedesignfile.net/thedesignfile/2009/05/inspired-by-spring-green.html) but I strategically left most of the bedside tables out of the picture.

That's because they're those $15 white laminate shelf boxes or whatever. My husband is supposed to build us a couple custom pieces but...it's way down his to-do list.

Where are those metallic lamps from?

I long for an antique secretary's desk. So for now I have an old nightstand in place until I can afford what I want.

Our bed headboard, which came to us through Craigslist 'Free'. We bought a Temperpedic bed last year, which was a definite splurge just for the mattress and split box spring. Our bed now sits a good 6 inches taller than our old one, and the headboard is now buried behind us--it sits below the mattress, and we have to reach down to grab books, chap stick, whatever. It looks bad but feels divine!

I think most people have "placeholder" furniture. Most designers agree that the best way to pull a house together is to focus on one room at a time & completely finish it before moving to another. It's true, but doesn't always happen due to life. I think those bedside tables are fine if they're temporary and perhaps they might look better with a bit of paint? Everything else seems pulled together & really, it is through time, effort and travel and acquiring accessories and art, that we really turn our places into a home that sings with personality and reflects the owner. Anyone can outfit a home in a weekend with a trip to Pottery Barn. BTW, lovely lamps. They're a classic from Restoration Hardware.

I think we all do. We don't have unlimited funds! :) My living room ad kitchen/dining are mostly just the way I want them but my bedroom & master bath is a mish-mash...need to buy all the key peices and a lot of art. Its expensive and so rather than have nothing, I've got functional IKEA and flea market finds. They do the job for now.

i don't have placeholder furniture. since i rely on luck for the right thing to turn up at the thrift store, on craigslist, or on the curb, i believe that if i want to replace something, i must get rid of it in order to make room (physically in the space and sort of spiritually in my life) for the right "new" piece to come along.

i like what i have. if i don't like it, i change it. i think i can make almost anything suit me, and if i can't, then someone else will be happy to have it. what a waste for me to hold on to it and resent it, when someone else could be enjoying it.

Nightstands are very hard to find. I finally found a beautiful set of hardwood cherry nightstands for $40 on Craigslist after searching for over three months. A pair of nightstands is extremely hard to find. I used a pair of wooden ikea folding chairs as nightstand placeholders. They kinda looked good in a creative, nontraditional way.

I'm surprised the results are 100% "yes". Doesn't everyone has some furniture, ugly or not, that they would like to replace some day? To name a few, I have a placeholder dining set, nightstand, TV stand, console/entry table, and the entire suite of furniture in the guest bedroom!

currently just about everything in our guest room is a placeholder piece: bedside table, 2 mis-matched bookshelves, lamps...

It took me 3 years, but I finally finished my home. Then my life changed and I sold my house, got a another one, and now,so many items that were perfect in my previous home have become placeholders in my new home. Very frustrating!

I like to think of the color on the walls in my place as "placeholder paint."

We had the exact same night tables for 3 years before I finally found great night stands! So funny! Why in the world is it so hard to find a good night stand? I don't get it! Two other big placeholders - an Ikea malm dresser is filling in until I find a perfect dresser, and a Crate and Barrel veneered dining table is filling in for now. What I really want is something with solid wood and something a bit more interesting. Current table is very boring. We also have a couple of the Ikea NOT lamps ($8 each) that are definitely placeholders. However, we plan to move in the nearish future so I don't want to invest in anything now when I don't know what our needs will be in a new house.

My rented flat is furnished with some unbelieveably bad furniture! I've been given the go head to replace the bed but that still leaves the ugly (yet, ironically, really comfy!) 3 piece, which no amount of throws can disguise, let alone improve upon (advice most welcome!).

Last weekend though, I finally got round to a quick-fix makeover for the coffee table. It was a curious combination of turned wood base, matt black, topped with black translucent glass - kind of naff victoriana in mourning meets ugly eighties tat! I had brought with me some untreated pine shelf lengths when I moved in and some odd lengths of 2X1 (like you do!) and as soon as I saw the coffee table, I knew its fate! By bracing two shelf pieces with the 2x1 cut to fit inside the base, I simply removed the glass top to the back of a store cupboard (just incase) and replaced it with my homemade top. It may have more knots in it than an Ikea kitchen unit but it could only be an improvement and, as the surface is wider and longer, I've got more space on it AND the base pretty much vanishes in the shadow of the overhang - mission accomplished! Moving it around is not as hefty a task now either - like those Playtex bras of old, my coffee table also lifts and separates...

Of course we have placeholder furniture! And we totally have the exact same placeholder nightstands. Guilty. But sometimes you just can't rush decorating and the perfect piece(s) don't all cross your path exactly when you start looking. Patience is a virtue when trying to decorate to your own taste!

Sofa and bed are placeholders. Arts and crafts/sewing table also placeholder. The husband's whole office is a one roomful of placeholders...

Speaking of Ikea - the Poang chair is our placeholder until we can afford a grown up chair (one that won't send our guests flying)

I am currently using a ceramic yellow lamp I have owned since childhood as my bedside lighting source. It has no shade and I don't want to spend the money on one knowing I am going to replace the lamp soon. It has been this way for more than a year. I actually no longer notice the bare bulb eyesore anymore (althought I have to be careful not to look directly at the lamp when it is lit.) I am still holding out for that perfect lamp.

I just hit the 5 year mark with my studio, which was my first place on my own, and I'm just now getting to the point where I can afford some of the furniture I actually want.

Some pieces I've wanted all along and just now have the cash to purchase one every now and then. Others, I have yet to find. I think decor is such an evolution because now some of my "keeper" chairs are under consideration for reupholstering.

I have had a placeholder Ikea rug for three years now. I keep dreaming that one day I'll be able to afford my dream rug from the Rug Company but I haven't gotten it together yet. I think subconsciously I put it off b/c I feel silly spending so much for a rug, but anything else in that space will always "feel" second best to me. So my Ikea rug just keeps holding the place.

Yes...and it's ALL from Ikea. The thing is, while I don't want to keep most of it long-term (I don't foresee parting with my Expedit), I don't think any of it is ugly and I feel like I am still able to make my studio feel like my own through decorative items.

My living room rug. It's huge and came with the place, and so has worked, but is so ugly I'm just counting the days until Crate and Barrel puts the rug I want on sale. Is there a usual time of the year that they do that?

Yes and no. Just because it's IKEA doesn't mean it's necessarily placeholder. I never buy anything I don't like, even if it is temporary stuff. While I do think that it's great to buy investment pieces, I don't think that living for 10 years with a placeholder sofa that's fugly while you save up for the "perfect one" really makes any sense. it's like when you see those women walking down the street in rollers in their hair. They go through all the trouble to look fab, for an occasion, but go out in rollers for anyone to see until the time arrives. True style and beauty shouldn't be reserved only for special occasions, it should be about making things as stylish and lovely as possible at any given time, IMO...

Good Heavens! There are women who still do that? =0

I'm 45 and still have placeholder furniture! I think that is always the case if you like to change things up. The only people who don't have placeholders are those who go out and buy matching sets of new furniture and consider the job "done."

But I NEVER purchase items understood as placeholders. All of my placeholders are holdovers or curb finds -- not purchases. I would rather have nothing than spend money on something I consider to be temporary.

Incidentally, this often makes for a less than comfortable house. Right now, I have no nightstands (why are these so difficult to find?) and no dining room table. I will not spend money on placeholders! This makes my husband insane.

My bedroom has two dressers -- one is antique and beautiful, the other is fugly and from my college years. The storage is too valuable, so I can't get rid of it till I save up for a proper replacement or thrift a good one.

The too-small rug in the den is tiding me over till after the holiday madness, when I plan to replace it with a proper flokati rug.

I'm living without nightstands, because I refuse to spend money on placeholders, and I can't seem to find ones I like that are affordable.

As someone who has just started out in my career, pretty much everything is a placeholder! But that doesn't mean I don't like any of it. Quite the contrary. It's mostly Ikea and hand-me-downs, but I still carefully picked out every piece of furniture and I enjoy them all. If my $15 Ikea Lack sidetables last another ten years, I'm sure I will continue to find uses for them.

"Incidentally, this often makes for a less than comfortable house. Right now, I have no nightstands (why are these so difficult to find?) and no dining room table. I will not spend money on placeholders! This makes my husband insane." - arroyo

Isn't your comfort worth something too? I remember reading a post where someone zip-tied together four plastic folding chairs while they were saving money for a nice sofa. I could NEVER do that.

Placeholder furniture can always be resold or given away to someone else who needs it, and you could not pay me the $300 it cost to buy an inexpensive sofa to come home from work to the sight of four plastic folding chairs. I can't imagine anything more depressing than that.

My lighting fixtures - I would like to get rid of the gold fixtures and get something more modern. The closet doors - these old metal bi-folds with some nice sliding doors. The room doors - they are simple slab doors.

As a new home owner, I can not afford what I really want and I really can't justify paying alot of money on furniture. It's been Ikea and Craigslist right now.

nearly everything! YAY Student life! not really tho, just my dining set, one couch, my desk, my car, my bookshelves, my coffee table.....sigh

yep, i'm pretty much the same most everyone here. a little of everything: some fr hubbie's batch. days, a little of my youth furniture, mixed with some "first-place", craigslist items. "when we get the money" is when we replace. gaw, whenever that is. haha. maybe we should stop looking for excuses and buy the darn replacements? then we'll send it here for the 15 mins of fame??. =)

Almost all the cheap hand-me-down furniture my mother gave us when we moved. She wouldn't be offended by cheap since most of it is stuff she got til she could do better - and then I asked for it for my first place. So end tables, nightstands, etc.

Even though I am middle-aged, I am still replacing many of the less-than-desirable pieces of furniture I have from my youth with items that I will love and cherish for, well, years to come. But it is expensive to buy the pieces I want, and it will probably take me another 5-10 years before I feel like I have a grown-up collection of furniture. And even if I did have a large sum to spend to replace these items, I would take my time to find things that I really love. In the meantime, I have some nice-looking, inexpensive things from Ikea and a few cheap things I have acquired over the years that were always meant to be temporary. It really does take time, and your tastes, at least my tastes, change every five years or so, so I prefer to spend my money on things I know will last and that I love and that can be upgraded with items that can easily be given away as those tastes change.

The majority of my furniture would qualify as 'placeholder'. It just doesn't make sense for me to buy or spend a lot of time looking for great stuff since I'm still in school, have student loans, and will likely be moving onto a new city in a few years anyway. I'll probably end up selling or giving away most of my current apartment and starting over with better-quality things (hopefully) when I have a real job.

Those IKEA tables are fine. I think they have great lines, but the plastic inserts don't work in your home. Don't replace them, just hack them. Replace the plastic inserts with something else - wallpaper over them, or use cloth or a placemat to cover them, or stained glass or a faceted mirror or sheet metal. There are probably a zillion options. And they'd probably look better in that space in either a darker stain - though they might blend a little too much with the floor - or possibly a colored stain or even painted.

My sofa is my biggest place holder. An ugly, "pleatherette" monster. Not at all my taste, but I needed a sofa, and scored it for a low low price, otherwise I would go with-out before purchasing. Even pieces I find in the trash I consider wants over place holders, as if I don't like it, or don't see the potential, it will stay in the trash. I've gotten a lot of good pieces from the trash, people don't know what they are throwing away!!

Much of our furniture is what I had when my husband and I first moved in together, so much of it is considered "placeholder." When I was in my first apartment I bought a dresser and one nightstand because it was all I had the budget for at the time. I'm kicking myself now because I'd love to have the matching nightstand for his side of the bed. Right now we just have a placeholder poorly painted table thing with a shelf that I bought at a garage sale with the intention of painting it and using in the entryway. I'll probably just replace both nightstands with something else, even if it doesn't match the dresser, paint the ugly little table and use it in the entryway then sell the good nightstand on Craigslist.

I would say that 75% of my furniture needs to be replaced. Our college bookcase collapsed under the weight of our books. The arm chair and sofa from west elm got destroyed by one of my cats. We need to upgrade our bed a full to a queen. I'm getting back pain from trying to sleep comfortably in that bed! I'd also like to replace my west elm coffee table while I'm at it. However, student loans, rebuilding my emergency funds, and paying for our wedding takes precedent.

Don't know if it counts, but my duvet I got on sale from West Elm is a place holder. I'm having trouble finding a good duvet for my mcm house.