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Is there anything worse than assembling IKEA furniture? (1 Viewer)

What’s Worse?

  • Assembling IKEA Furniture

    Votes: 14 27.5%
  • nothing

    Votes: 37 72.5%

  • Total voters
    51

fantasycurse42

Footballguy Jr.
Supposed to be a blizzard in NY today, scheduled an IKEA delivery, figured it would be the perfect day to assemble a bunch of kids furniture. Forecast was wrong, as was my purchase of IKEA stuff.

Whenever I buy stuff from IKEA, I always regret it. 

2 dressers, a desk, and my wife got this glass showcase thing for our room. 90 minutes in, halfway through the first dresser, fml.

 
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Yep, could’ve definitely been worse. Had your wife forced you to walk through their maze that they call a store, that would’ve definitely been worse.  At least, I hope you avoided that.  Good luck.

 
Yep, could’ve definitely been worse. Had your wife forced you to walk through their maze that they call a store, that would’ve definitely been worse.  At least, I hope you avoided that.  Good luck.
I didn’t avoid it, that activity was last week :kicksrock:

 
 Put some tunes on, a few beers, and get to work. I find it relaxing. Like putting a giant Lego set together.

 
I bought a bed with storage underneath for my daughter a couple of years ago.  Needed an engineering degree to assemble it..took me 6 hours.

 
Dressers are the worst. 

Tables aren’t bad. Neither are their desks.

Trying to dissemble them to move then reassemble it is even worse. 

 
Colonoscopy prep is worse.

Teaching your kid to drive is worse. 

Getting caught in middle of Wife/MIL dispute is worse.

Watching ABInBev buy up craft brewers then have Bud Light commercials where rhey mock craft beer nerds is worse.

So. Yes

 
I honestly enjoy it.  So much so I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to turn it into a side hussle, but I didn’t think there would be many people willing to pay for such a thing.

 
Pretty sure I’ve shared this story before. When my wife first moved in with me years ago we bought a PAX closet and I got so stoned and drunk while assembling. She fell asleep on the couch and I got to the part with the exclamation point and two fat dudes standing it up. I decided I could handle it in my own got it to a 45 degree angle before it exploded into shards with the volume of a gunshot and ripped my arms to shreds and almost killed the cat. 

Im actually pretty good at assembling. Just follow the instructions!

 
At least you got to enjoy the thrills of Elizabeth NJ and Newark Airport before the assembly, so you have that going for you.

 
The thing I love about IKEA furniture is you can just rip it apart and pitch it if you get sick of it. 

 
I’ve only bought a few bookshelves there, but I found them surprisingly easy to assemble and I generally outsource any and all manual labor. 

 
I usually stop at the point they are telling me to bolt it into the wall.

I do think IKEA must be a running joke in Switzerland about the crap that Americans will buy.  The Swedish Meatballs arent even good.

 
if it will make you feel better & I'm sure it will i spent 4 1/2 hours putting together a baby crib in my living room watching sports.   Did not fit through the door to the baby's bedroom.  Take apart, reassemble in baby's room, drink a case of beer.

 
I always find myself putting on one or two panels on backwards, which requires me to disassemble the whole thing and put it back together again.

But, I also put my son's pants on backwards yesterday, and did not know until my wife came home and mocked me several hours later.  So, I may just be incompetent.

 
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When my son turned 11, he had outgrown his Lightening McQueen bed. . . honestly I think his feet were hanging over the bed, he had some mix and mash pieces, etc. At that time we didn't have an Ikea here in Indy so we could either drive to Cincinnati or Chicago. . . we chose Cincinnati.  Man, sometimes you just luck out.  I rented a Chevy Tahoe/Toyota Sequoia sized SUV for the day, went to pick it up, it's sitting there and two or three employees are surrounding it.  I walked inside, hoping that was someone else's, it wasn't, it was mine.  It had a check engine light and it wasn't running properly.

The guy behind the counter said "I'm really sorry, I can't rent that to you but I have an extended length Sprinter, it's all cleaned up and ready to go.  I said "absolutely, let's do that."  He said "for being so cool man, I'm going to give you unlimited miles and I'll rent it at the price of an economy car."  Done deal.  I took it home, I removed a row of removable seats (put it in the garage) and off we drove to Cincinnati.  We had never been to Ikea before, I wasn't sure what to expect and thank God we got that van b/c we got him a dresser, two night stands, bed, mattress, desk, glass tops for his furniture, mirrors, tons of kitchen crap, bathroom rugs, etc.  Honestly, we completely filled that Sprinter.

So, I really enjoy working with my hands, I don't know how handy I am but I've always enjoyed putting things together.  I put part of the dresser together, it took me an hour or 90 minutes and as I'm assembling it I found I put it together incorrectly and I thought "crap, I have to take this apart and redo it."  So I had two light bulb moments here.

1.) RTFM - Read The Freaking Manual because I was going by what I thought made sense to me, that was 100% on me.

2.) More importantly than anything - DON'T use those stupid little hex wrenches - it's a big waste of time and terribly frustrating.  I got out my cordless drill, popped in a hex key bit, RTFM'd the hell out of the instructions and sailed through the rest of that furniture.  There's tight places where you may be forced to use the hex key wrench but by and large the drill with a hex key bit is the way to go.

I will say say this, is Ikea furniture great quality or whatever?  Of course not, but for a kids room or college dorm or first apartment, newly weds on a budget, etc. I think it's awesome because you have furniture, it fills the room, you're probably going to move a few times and after a few years you can either toss that stuff, give it away, donate it or at least if it gets damaged in a move, it's not the end of the world.  Especially for kids that beat the crap out furniture, I think it's pretty awesome.

 
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Update; still awful.

2 dressers, this glass wall display thing (which my wife wanted for our room), and a desk/accompanying shelves/attachment took about 8.5 hours (maybe 11 total start to end, as I took some breaks). 

I did pick up a new 5.1 speaker system and a new TV for my family room, so I got to enjoy the games while doing this, so that was nice. 

Shark tip

For high end TVs, best time to purchase is right after CES in early Jan, when the manufacturers release their new models every year.

The dressers really left my back killing me with the bending down/leaning/etc..

When I was setting up/organizing everything, my boys brought in their Home Depot tool kit and toolbox - I didn’t really notice, and then I see them going through it, I’m like “please stop touching my tools, these aren’t toys.” Wife was right there, she’s like “actually, that’s exactly what they are.” That thing looks pretty realistic :lol:

They were pretty funny throughout the day, they’d come and go, see what I was up to, go through their tools, and then try to imitate what I was doing.

Funny someone mentioned the attaching the wall thing. I took a break on the 2nd dresser at that step to eat and relax for a little. My wife thought she would help, so when I came back in the room, the brackets are attached to the inside of the dresser and she asked where do these thing go? I got a good laugh from that and another this morning when I read someone posting about it in here.

All in all, I think the dressers from IKEA are way too time consuming and prob will never purchase another one of those from there again, but whatever, it’s done.

 
Jefferson the Caregiver said:
I usually stop at the point they are telling me to bolt it into the wall.

I do think IKEA must be a running joke in Switzerland about the crap that Americans will buy.  The Swedish Meatballs arent even good.
:hophead:

 
If you have young kids I highly recommend attaching your bookshelves (ikea or otherwise) to the wall.  

 
You're reminding me of the time I cheaped out and didn't pay Toys R Us $10 to assemble my kids' bike.  :wall:

Missing parts, bad instructions, hours of frustration, similar to what you are going through.  :hot:

 
At least you got to enjoy the thrills of Elizabeth NJ and Newark Airport before the assembly, so you have that going for you.
it's been in brooklyn for a decade. but maybe he went there too?

the malm series is pretty decent. easy-ish to put together and looks good for a while. yeah, I'd prefer to buy it pre-made, but awfully hard to beat that price.

 
Built/assembled a whole kitchen from IKEA components.  Turned out great.
for now... ;)  

I've installed a bunch of those- even in super luxe NYC townhouses (meant as a short-term thing that they ended up living in). as long as they're glued and installed plumb and true, they're great. a nice piece of stone on top and most people wouldn't begin to guess they're ikea.

 
I could put together IKEA stuff all day long. Its oddly cathartic for me, relaxing and satisfying (obviously, combined with drugs and alcohol, some music.)  As someone noted above, its like doing a lego or a jigsaw puzzle. Its been many years since we bought anything from IKEA, but I did quite a few pieces for our first house about 15 years ago and thought the directions were excellent (in comparison to other assembly mail-order stuff I've had to deal with over the years.) It takes some patience and diligence, but is a thing of beauty when it all comes together.

 

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