Image source: Merlina McGovern
Someday, when I’m really, really rich, I will never, ever put together another piece of furniture again. Sadly, that day is not today.
Yesterday, I spent some time, well, let’s be real, I spent about four hours putting together a smallish cabinet for my bathroom. The instruction booklet had 31 pages, and there were seemingly a million separate pieces to put together. The cabinet had four small drawers and a larger attached storage area with two doors that swung on hinges. Everything could be put together with small wooden dowels, screws that needed hex keys and regular screwdrivers, and cam lock screws. All the holes that I needed to use were pre-drilled.
As I started to put together the various shelves, drawer tracks, and even the metal magnets used to keep the door shut, it felt quite satisfying to put the piece together bit by bit. The instructions were actually clear, and I was super happy that many of the pieces had individual labels. So rather than having two pieces labeled as 1, but one is a left side and the other is a right side, those pieces would be labeled 1 and 2, making it very hard to put things together backwards.
After four hours, I was finally done. I had managed to only put together one shelf backward, requiring me to unscrew only four screws.
Image source: Merlina McGovern
Easy peasy, I thought. It was then that I made the biggest mistake ever. I had another box that I had left aside thinking I'd put it together when I had time. Fresh off of the success of my bathroom cabinet project, I thought, why not, let’s get this shelf put together while I’m still in the construction mood.
Big mistake. BIG. MISTAKE.
This time, I was putting together a nice little bench with a cushion and storage cubbies to go under my living room window. This project had far fewer pieces, and the instruction book only had six pages. How bad could it possibly be?
Famous last words, of course. The main problem was that many of the pieces needed to be held together with wooden dowels that were rather short. This left many of the pieces popping off as I tried to hold them all together by myself (I was doing both projects on my own). After wrestling with the pieces for what felt like ages, I finally propped up one side against a wall so that pieces would be pushed together and less likely to fall apart as I worked on other sections.
Finally, after jerry rigging a setup to keep the pieces pushed together while I worked, I had gotten to the part where I could add some stabilizing screws. Of course, when it came time to add the screws, the pre-drilled holes were slightly misaligned. A wave of aggravation rolled over me as I pushed and pulled the pieces (that kept popping off the wooden dowels) so that they could align for a millisecond while I managed to get a screw in.
By this time, I could feel pain shooting up my back as I had been sitting on the floor for at least an hour and a half, and sweat was freely running down the backs of my knees—ugh!
But, I persevered, and, finally, I had gotten the main pieces screwed in. All that was left was to screw on the thin back panel. That just needed 16 small screws, but that should be fine, right? Right?
Wrong!
As I aligned the back panels, I realized with horror that there were no pre-drilled holes for the tiny screws. And the screws were too small to easily bite into the hard wood they needed to go into. My little manual screwdriver wasn’t going to cut it. Sixteen measly little screws were all that stood between me and a finished storage cabinet. I made the trek down to my basement to grab our power drill. There was very little juice left in the battery, but it was just enough to screw in each of the sixteen screws.
When I was done, I sat back and wanted to go to bed. It had been such a horror show, and I wondered if it was because my expectations had been set so high. With only six pages of instructions, surely this couldn’t have been any more difficult than the bathroom cabinet, right?
But I have some satisfaction that I was able to put both of these pieces together on my own, and we now have functional and pretty storage (that I’m sure will instantly fill up and require yet more DIY furniture down the line).
I never remembered putting together furniture with my parents. We used to actually go to furniture stores and pick out whole pieces to bring home. Furniture was expensive, so it wasn’t something that we did very often. Nowadays, furniture is cheap, and you can order it and have it delivered to your doorstep in a week. Is it worth it? I don’t know. While I like putting together furniture and the satisfaction it can bring, some of these things are so cheaply made and seem to be designed to make your job putting it together a thousand times harder than it needs to be.
How about you? Are you happy to put together furniture on your own? Share any furniture horror stories you have in the comments below.
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