As is customary with all contemporary homicides, mine began with these three words: home furniture assembly. Now, when I say “home furniture assembly,” I’m talking about those pre-built furniture kit you assemble YOURSELF. “I’m going to swing by IKEA real quick,” I lied to myself.
“I’ll grab a bookshelf I’ve been wanting AFTER dinner on Saturday.
Worst case scenario, I’ll be done within the hour.”
Boy was I wrong. After guessing wrong multiple times about which hole goes to which screw for the first three hours, I ended up on my living room floor drowning in a sea of styrofoam peanuts, 74 wooden pieces that looked identical to the other 74 pieces and a cardboard cutout that didn’t fit the instructions by any stretch of the imagination.
Let’s just say that my right thumb was now stuffed with crimson after grasping a screw that clearly wanted to kill me. Furthermore, my back was screaming at me that it wanted to retire early and all I wanted to do was throw the whole thing into a fire and blame.Global blogattoners aact of God. Let me tell you about the instructions.
The instructions –jokingly-s were printed on sixteen pages of diagrams that could only be described as Picasso teaching someone how to assemble furniture with interpretive dance. Worst of all, they were drawings. No words.
Sure, there were diagrams and pictures of random stick figures happily finishing task after task. But where were the words? Why would they include any sort of explanation as to what the fuck any of these parts did?
The instructions were made up of unnecessarily suggestive pictograms, arrows drawn by preschoolers, and indiscriminate exclamation points that highlighted the dangers of microwaving your television. Page one: happy stick figure opening up a box and jumping up with excitement. Page sixteen: SAME stick figure smiling next to a successfully built bookshelf.
Pick any random page in between: still smiling like an idiot. Perhaps we can all relate to this question in our quiet life time. Why can’t they include words.
My theory: makechrach used lightening on all of the unassembled pages. Magic. Magic is what helped those pieces come together because let me tell you something about magic.
Magic is impossible to explain. It’s like trying to understand quantum physics but with Dance Moms judging. Those infographics that listed out all the parts included: screws, bolts, wooden dowels, and unidentified metal objects that I still christened to this day.
Psychic warfare was established as soon as I opened the box. These parts would each have a letter and then a number. The number symbolized how many of that particular part you would have.
Simple enough, right? Identical part ‘A’ with small screw meet identicle Part ‘A’ with a longer screw that serves the exact same purpose… aka NOTHING. Alright, these parts might’ve been different to someone with literally a doctorate in hardware.
To me, they looked the same exact fuckin’ thing. And now, they laid there scattered across my floor like the aftermath of a bomb in a stripper condom factory. I opened up the box only to find an extra handful of screws.
Did those even exist? Maybe they did. I sure as hell didn’t want to count to make sure because I knew the second I started counting, I’d find that one number that would surely ruin my project.
Lies. The absolute second I opened up the box I believed I was being deceived. Written in big, bold letters was Mount Everest exclaimed “Easy Assembly.” Attached was another lying sentence that read ‘No Special Tools Required.’
COMPLETE IN 45 MINUTES.” Newsflash IKEA: No one actually consumes cereal in 2 minutes and ironically, I was lactose intolerant.
Assembling my bookshelf was anything but easy. Construction came with no directions. Just pictures.
Ever blindly follow directions that make zero sense? You look at the pictures and think to yourself: “Piece A obviously goes to Part B because that’s the only thing it could possibly go to.” WRONG. About an hour in, I found myself calling those two pieces names out loud for not fitting together when I thought everything had a plan.
What was supposed to be a simple “match-the-numbers-to-the corresponding parts of the bookshelf” turned into an hour of frustration. Screwdriver in hand, I was:
Fuckery. And that’s what I had come to accept furniture assembly to be.
As I was rummaging through the messy pile of parts that fell out of the box (aka “assembly area”), I discovered step 3 of 12. Now at this time I was actually….. ahead.
Two pieces of wood connected by dowels, screws that obviously spent too much time together at college to fit each other just slightly under the width of the pre-made holes. The diagrams illustrated your fingers slipping the wooden dowel into place like it was some sort of game. Trust me, it wasn’t.
Between adrenaline and pure frustration I found myself sweating bullets telling each dowel how they personally enjoyed not fitting into the corresponding hole with every squat my body made to reach the “lower shelf”(AKA my height). Sound familiar? THAT is how I imagined marriage would be like.
Okay, so moving on. About an hour into my construction mayhem, I had discovered my least favorite part of ANY furniture assembly: THE OFFICIAL PLUG THAT SUCKS AT BEING A PLUG. You know, the dowel that fits into every hole meant for that particular dowel except for the last one….
PIECE OF SHIT. Push. Pull.
Force smiley at the innocent knob as if it should know any better. Rip it out and start all over. Cycle through steps one through three again and glance at the instructions like you missed something.
You didn’t. The furniture gods are mocking you, harvesting bits of joy from your soul with each click your brain hears. Oh, and just when you thought it was safe to use that allen wrench that came with your new “death trap” – you slowly watch it bend because of the abuse.
Yours becomes the chuck wrench that started to strip the heads of your screws around hour four. It was at this moment I got good at beating my penis. But hey, that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days assembling furniture.
Promise yourself that you WILL fit together. Subconsciously, you start plotting your death as you look over at your bookshelf mockingly smiling at you with its undocumented scratches and missing screws. You start to lose count on how many times you’ve taken this certain step apart.
By tear down, reassemble count: you have put this same step together approximately 419 times. 432 AND STILL NOTHING. Swearing you swear becomeEmbedFor BIG words a regular human being can’t pronounce, step 7/14 suddenly becomes a piece of cake.
Or at least, that’s what it feels like when you discover both sides have numbers… ON THE INSIDE. Jokes on you, dummy. Those numbers were on there whole time!
They just decided to print them so small that you couldn’t see them without renting a magnifying glass from the local science museum. Construction became easy. Words can not describe how these parts fit together.
It was like they were praying to be connected by every swing of your hammer. Okay, I’m exaggerating. We were not friends at this point.
Assembly and I were going to settle our disagreement by mercilessly beating each other. One side of the shelf was completed. By completed, I mean three screws were missing but it somehow stood upright by itself.
Relief washed over me until I started working on the other side. Traffic jams were less congested than the pieces of wood flowing through the different assembly areas. What in the actual fuck?
! Slowly but surely, that one side began to come together. My heart sank as I realized I was going to have to take ALL of it apart to begin anew.
AGAIN. Rip out whatever part you just finished, throw your (now very bruised)Allen wrench across the room flailing your genitals as you curse down everything you once believed in. If assembling furniture has taught me anything, it’s that there is a God(s) and they hate me.
Ever tried to rebuild something you didn’t take apart? Yeah, me neither. As much as I didn’t want to, I had no choice but to dismantle my bookshelf.
Hours go by as you tell yourself how lucky you are that there were no assembly instructions online because we all know how that turns out. Trust me. Minutes felt like seconds and seconds felt like hours.
Just as you think you might cry, YOU FINISH! Boom. There it was: a triumphant bookshelf staring right back at me.
But upon further inspection, it wasn’t AS triumphant as I was. Of course, my bookshelf could barely stand on its own. Both sides had screws missing and resembled a leaning tower of anything but pasta.
It was there that I realized my chair resembled Frankenstein’s monster if he had put together his monster with a chopstick and bike grease. Abstract art? Maybe.
Well built? No fucking way. Did I mention that I didn’t have the instructions up at this time?
No? Well I didn’t because I threw them across the room during my ejaculating moment of rage. Mistakes were made.
But hey, it’s still functional and that’s what counts, right? So there I was thinking how durable this thing would be because I only used about… fifty percent of the screws provided. Sure, let’s do that.
Before I was able to test out the stability of my bookshelf, I stumbled upon more screws. THREE loose screws that I somehow managed to not notice before! “Interesting,” I thought to myself.
“They must have extra pieces here we don’t need.”
How wrong I was. I placed a book on it light as a feather and – NOTHING. It worked!
Barely. I added another book, and then another. By book number five, I didn’t know whether to shit or go home.
How the fuck did my shelf not collapse under the weight of a phone book? ! But my shelf didn’t.
It stood tall….. kinda. I sat down on my couch and looked over at my new masterpiece.
As silly as it may sound, I felt accomplished. Sure, it took me six hours to build a bookshelf, but what I built was something with my own two hands. Approximately seven shots worth of sweat and hate.
You wouldn’t think I would swear like a sailor while building furniture but hey, I guess writing this article proves that theory wrong. Although I only spent 6 hours on this project. Hours that don’t include the 15 minute boil where I sat ON THE FLOOR crying about how furniture assembly was supposedly NON-existent.
I could’ve never imagined the instruction manual’s words NO SPECIAL TOOLS REQUIRED” needed to be any more optimistic. The struggles I came to encounter with screws, hammers, screw drivers, and in desperate need – butter knives were impossible. As I began to clean up the mess I had made, I scooped up all the directions hoping I could take down where it all went wrong.
That’s when it hit me: why do we do this to ourselves? Out of pure curiosity, I dug through the stuffing only to find… More stuffing. Enough stuffing to cushion the blow if Rob Ford fell out of a bike.
And who knows, maybe that’s what it was originally used for. I also found enough cardboard to build….. Well, I could’ve built a pretty thing out of cardboard.
The reason why we assemble furniture is no mystery to me. Too bad nobody wants to pay for furniture that’s already put together. Money.
That’s why, money is the reason why we’re all out here crossing our fingers that “Easy Assembly” isn’t a scam. We convince ourselves that we’re saving money when we buy unassembled furniture. What we don’t take into account is the time we waste, the sanity we lose, and the blood pressure medicine we have to buy after every damn project.
Another reason? Pride. Stubborn pride.
The second you begin assembling furniture, you begin a battle. A battle of man vs pre-made-flat-pack. Give up on your furniture and you might as well confess that you were defeated.
No man wants to be that man. My bookshelf now sits in the corner of my living room, filled with books I intentionally bought because they were light. Pssh, it’s cute.
Well, depending on your angle and lighting I suppose you could say it actually looks half decent. I have it leaned up against the wall to avoid anyone seeing the bigger picture. Girlfriend hates it.
But hey, people have actually complimented my bookshelf. Unbelievable right? Wrong.
I feel a sense of pride when I look at it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not good but I built effing built it. “I crafted this beauty with my own hands,” I say as I picture myself cutting down trees and beating the pure metal into shape with my damn face.
What I don’t tell them is I swear on everything I hold dear that I will NEVER buy another item with “simple assembly” in the description. Next time I’m buying furniture, I’m paying extra to have it built for me AND I’m paying more money to buy furniture that doesn’t come in a box. Lessons, like our favorite Allen wrench, are hard to forget.
Lesson’s AND the three unused screws that are now nick named my children sit in my drawer with extra parts from my other DIY fails.
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