Furniture Jigsaw Puzzle

Furniture Jigsaw Puzzle ©

By Michael Casey

You can buy anything on the Internet and have it delivered to you, and you get a good price. Though there is one snag, certainly if you are buying furniture, it does not arrive as you see it on your screen, on the Internet, no it arrives like a jigsaw puzzle. What I mean is its all flat-packed and you have to grunt and groan and curse your way through it till it is assembled.

As I have a funny stairs I had to have pine beds as ordinary beds just would not fit up the stairs, I did want a pine bed anyway but to have to assemble it was a small challenge. A pine bed is one thing as it is just a rectangle with slats in the middle, however when you move to different items of furniture it does get more complicated.

My bed was a success, and I remember my mother launching herself onto the mattress, all 15 stones plus of her, to prove we had built it properly. It was only 3 days later that the shop discovered they had forgotten the central support. Other than that the bed lasted over 20 years, my children were conceived in it. I can remember as a child how you used to need a spanner, as the beds were made of metal with a spring section attached with enormous and very heavy head boards.

So we have all progressed with our pine beds that are nice to look at and to sleep in. Though I must say the mattress should cost at least double the cost of the actual bed, I am heavy so maybe I’m prejudiced, but as a rule of thumb I think I’m right. As my dad used to say, buy rubbish and you end up paying more as you buy twice. So save money by buying quality, and you can get quality from the most unexpected sources, so don’t be a shop snob, though having said that I do have my favourite store.

So the thing arrives and you tear open the box, I used to use a pen from my computer desk, here in front of me from where I’m talking to you from. Until I kept on breaking the pens, so I advanced to a box cutter, you can open anything in seconds.  Then you spill everything on the floor and kick something under a chair, it takes half an hour to find it, you curse and curse and blame the cat, until finally you find it.

Or that used to be the way I did things, nowadays I’m like a surgeon, I open and lay out the bits, the screws and Alan Keys , the wood and metal bits. The long and the short and the round bits, and any other weird and wonderful parts to my set of drawers or office chair or bed, or whatever it is. Once laid out, a bit like cutlery at a state banquet, I begin. At a banquet I believe you start at the outside and work your way to the inside, and remember not to wipe your mouth on your cuffs.

As for making an office chair you just follow your nose, and never read the instructions, does anybody ever read assembly instructions. They may as well include a bag of sweets instead of the instructions, nobody ever reads them. Until things go wrong, or at the very end to see why you have 4 extra screws and where on earth should they go. Or just to hold up the instructions defiantly and spit in them and throw them in the bin, you are a winner, who needs instructions, or pictographs that only Egyptians from 4000 years ago would understand, and was it them who invented Ikea in the Valley of the Kings.