No more modular furniture, ever! A photo essay in real time

Friday 11:27 am. Project completed.

Every time I put together a piece of modular furniture from Ikea or Target or wherever, I vow, on the graves of my sainted grandparents, that I will never, ever, ever buy any of this junk ever, ever, ever again.

We needed a new bookcase.

Guess what.

 

Ok, there goes my morning.  Yours too if you keep checking back.  I'm live-blogging the process because why should I suffer alone?   Updates as steps are completed or until I take an ax to the damn thing and chop it all up for kindling.

Step 1.  Open box.  Stare amazedly at incoherent stack of parts and "hardware" while wondering how in the world she talked you into this again.

Step 2.  Sit quietly for several minutes, without making any sudden movements that might scare them off, and wait for the furniture elves to arrive and put the thing together for you.

Step 3.  Curse the furniture elves and tell yourself that if they were really competent elves they'd be making shoes or toys or baking cookies in trees and you're better off without their help.

Step 4.  After completing Step 4a. (Explain to wife why work could not begin without twenty minutes of silent thought and blogging.  Pretend not to notice when she rolls her eyes.) move on to Step 4b. Sigh heavily and begin to do the work yourself.

Step 5.  RTFM.  Always read the fine manual.

Step 6.  Toss aside the f---ing manual because it's the size of an f---ing phone book and you could get through Tolstoy in the original Russian in half the time.  Besides, you've done this a dozen times before, what do you need with a manual?

Step 7.  Look over parts scattered across the floor.   Fish instruction book out of recycling.

Step 8.  Open Hardware Pack One.

Step 9.  Pick up all the pieces of "hardware" that went flying when the bag exploded as tore it open.  Tell yourself that the pieces that rolled under the couch are probably duplicates and you won't need them.

Step 10. Realize what you thought was Hardware Pack One was Hardware Pack Three.

Step 11.  Repeat Step 8, after carefully reading the label on the bag this time, dummy.

Steps 12-16.  Amaze yourself at your ability to actually follow the instructions and get this far without breaking anything, cutting yourself, or giving up in despair.

Step 17.  Be impressed that what you have assembled looks like it might actually turn out to be a bookcase.

Step 18-20.  Break something.  Cut yourself.  Give up in despair.

Step 21.  After a couple of cups of coffee and some zen meditation, return to worksite and survey efforts so far.

Step 22.  Become almost convinced that this isn't such a hard job after all.  Get back to work.

Step 23.  Read Cleveland Bob's comment on your post.  Become terrified you've made his mistake.  Go back through Steps 12-20.

Step 24.  After more coffee and meditation, get back to work again. 

Step 25-30.  Move along at record speed, becoming over-confident as you go.

Step 31.  Throw out empty plastic bags and plastic trees and left-over bits of packaging that are just getting in your way now.

Step 32.  Root through trash to retrieve pieces of hardware that were still in the bags you thought were empty.

Step 33.  Notice it's a beautiful day outside.

Step 34. Seriously consider stopping right here and going out for a walk, telling yourself there's no rush, you can finish this tonight or even tomorrow morning.

Step 35.  Imagine wife's reaction when she gets home to find unfinished bookcase and parts blocking her way through the living room.

Step 36.  Get back to work.

Step 37-49.  Insert, align, attach, rotate, flip, this, that, the other thing, etc etc etc.

Step 50.  Step back and stare in disbelief that you're actually done.

Step 51.  Tilt your head to try to fool yourself into thinking all the shelves are level.

Step 52.  Declare it all close enough for government work.  Try not to mind that a job you thought would take you an hour or so took two and a half.

Step 53.  Look at completed project from another angle.

Step 54.  Realize the damn thing doesn't look half bad.  You may actually have done a good job.

Step 55.  Start singing quietly, "If I was a carpenter, and you were my lady..."

Step 56.  Listen to voice inside your head saying, "You know, Lance, there are some women who would find a man who could handle this kind of project sexy."

Step 57.  Ignore other voice inside head saying, "Maybe if you had actually built thing from your own design using real wood and tools they would.  How many women are turned on by a guy who can follow instructions?"

Step 58.  Go back to listening to first voice.

Step 59.  Look around for wife.

Step 60.  Remember she left for work hours ago.

Step 61.  Sigh.

Step 62.  Remember she isn't that kind of woman anyway.  These kinds of things usually have the opposite effect because I'm always so full of myself afterwards.  Women married to husbands like me tend to become like the wives Jeeves describes as seeing it as their duty to put a damper on male enthusiasm.

Step 63.  Sigh again.

Step 64.  Try to be satisfied with a job well done while moving on to Step 65.

Step 65.  Vow that you will never, ever, ever again buy a piece of modular furniture!

Step 66.  Look behind you on living room floor and remember.

Step 67.  Target was having a sale. 

Comments

[Cleveland Bob]

Hiya Lance,

I just put a K/D piece together last weekend for our stereo set-up. All was fine until I realized that there were pre-drilled holes to join multiples of this bookcase together and that I had mistakenly (of course they didn't warn me about this beforehand in the instructions) put the pre-drilled holes on the front facade.

Seeing that it's black and in the basement, I refused to take it apart and potentially compromise the press board construction.

Moral of the story...double and triple check your work before locking those cams into their respective pegs.

Bon Chance!

Here's the link to my project...

http://tinyurl.com/cakwdl

[R]

Oh, Lance. Sympathies.

One does have to be obsessive with the little pieces and the instructions - my biggest pitfall is that I have a pretty good sense of how things fit together and I get cocky. With IKEA, especially, it pays to not only read the directions, but stare at the pictures - that's how you figure out that what you thought were two identical pieces are actually mirror images of each other, for example.

The other piece of advice I can offer is to have an assistant, and to remove all cats from the room.

[Uncle Merlin]

I vowed last December never to allow press board into my life again. And I'm sticking to that, I'll read with the lamps on the floor if I have too!

although, I saw a piece from IKEA that wasn't pressboard.......NO wake up you fool!! SLAP!

[Molly, NYC]

Is this the wrong place to say that I enjoy this sort of thing? It's like Legos for adults.

[Apostate]

Lance, Craigslist is your friend. I got rid of all my Ikea for real, quality furniture through finding real bargains at Craigslist. You live near a great urban area - NYC - which means you will find good quality stuff cheap.

I now have beautiful solidly constructed all-wood bookcases that I don't have to put together and that don't start falling apart after a few years. And they look great. I didn't pay more than $50 for any of them.

[Cleveland Bob]

Congrats, Lance.

You're the Lee Marvin of modular furniture assembling.

[Linkmeister]

And 'tis a far better thing to be "the Lee Marvin of modular furniture assembling" than the Dagwood Bumstead of modular furniture assembling. I guess.

[Shayera]

I once put together 5 IKEA bookcases and a dresser on the same day. Not one is done "correctly" as per the instructions. After a couple hours it became the Bataan death march of DIY furniture. I could see the end, but I wasn't sure I was ever going to get there.

[jeremy hunsinger]

No pressboard evermore... I only buy steel shelves or real wood now. shudders... pressboard.

[actor212]

Sheesh! It's not like you need an engineering degree to put this stuff together, altho I found a delightful neighbor currently unemployed by Raytheon who took my ten-year old daughter's loft bed to the lab and a team of technicians helped him put it together, and even tho they suspended work on a new satellite to focus on the bed, we had that puppy built and delivered in time for her eighteenth birthday.

[Judith]

Ha!

The problem is, *some* modular furniture is great and super easy, so while certain pieces make you curse other ones make you buy more. I purchased all the furniture in this apartment (except for my mattress and bed frame) from Target or Overstock and put it all together alone. I'm a small woman, and my upper body strength is negligible, so it took two weeks to get the stupid dresser together (every single drawer needed plastic slides hammered in and when they say hammer, they mean *hammer*). My desk has one leg that isn't actually screwed in and I just pray that the whole thing never collapses and lands my two thousand dollar computer on the floor. On the other hand, I have this fabulous "ladder" bookcase from Target that's amazing ($59). It has four shelves and there's no assembly required, whatsoever. I also have a great end table from target and coffee table from Overstock, both of which just required screwing the legs into the surfaces (the screws are built into the legs so no extra tools or parts). I'll be moving soon and ditching everything but the bookcase and the table which I can hopefully just slide on top of everything in the rental car, and I will probably be doing the Ikea thing again. However, we're going minimal furniture this time. Books? Stack along the wall, oh yeah, it's classy like that :-D

[R]

I have to second what Judith says about some DIY furniture being easier to assemble than others. Our Target Mission-style nightstands were very easy to put together, with nice brass connections that easily locked into place with little fuss. The cheapo shelf-drawer thing we got for the bathroom, made out of particle board and cardboard, was a nightmare to assemble - lots of fiddly bits and screws that were remarkably easy to overstrip. IKEA tends to be middle-of-the-road when it comes to quality.

One of the saddest places I've ever been was the returns center at IKEA. The rest of the store is bursting with happy modernist energy, cheerful families, pregnant couples, young thangs in love... and then, tucked in a somewhat dim corner, is this little zone of misery - people clutching lamps that didn't work, confusing furniture, and broken fixtures. We were only there to exchange a shelf component - we'd grabbed "ebony" instead of "birch" - so I could appreciate the pathos of it all.

[Dan Leo]

In the immortal words of Edward Gorey:

"I would rather die."

[Linkmeister]

Forgot. Did you ever read my tale of foolishness with a dresser?

[JerryA]

Your next project is the rubic cube of furniture, the Wassily chair (the spindly leather and chrome tubing one). My first one took what seemed like eight hours of mind-numbing effort. The second one (don't ask) took about ten minutes. This is the cheap $150 version, not the high dollar one. Practice does make perfect sometimes.

Good advice: have the guys at the store put it together. Save your male ego for playing Flight of the Bumblebee on the ukulele.

[Chris The Cop]

But after all that, now you can start doing what for me anyway is one (or is it two?) of the great unsung pleasures of life: putting books into the shelf from the overflow of your other shelves and then hitting the bookstores to fill the rest of it.

[MikeT]

Molly, I'm with you. I love that stuff. First it's a puzzle, and then it's furniture!

Just don't call it "building furniture". I have friends who do, and it drives me nuts. If you're not at least starting with a sheet of plywood, it's not building, it's assembling.