Love it or hate it flat pack furniture is here to stay

With more and more stores choosing to sell products in flat-pack form the likelihood of encountering a DIY assembly experience increases every week. Everything from a small stool to a full bells-and-whistles kitchen comes in a flat pack these days.

We understand the logic in the move to flat pack everything, the retailers save on warehousing and shipping, it’s easier for the average Joe without a ute to transport items home, and prices are able to be kept to a minimum. But it also means we have to assemble, assemble, assemble.

Hunting around for the perfect bed used to be the time consuming and difficult task of updating your bedroom. Now that’s the easy bit, half an hour on the internet and you can have chosen your funky new four-poster, ergonomic, a hypoallergenic bed which is guaranteed to provide you with the best sleep you’ve had since you were 4, plus help with those snoring problems your significant other keeps complaining about. Now all you have to do is clear out the car, hand over some hard-earned cash, and bring it home.

Now comes the challenging part, assembling the flat pack.

You know how it goes, find the right bits to go with the right shapes on the instructions and then put them all together in the right order to produce something which looks vaguely like the picture on the box.

Sounds simple, but for some reason, furniture manufacturing companies rarely seem to think it’s necessary to include numbers/colour coding/letters or anything to differentiate very similar parts. Parts so similar that the only difference between part A and part D, for instance, is that the bolt hole is 4mm higher for part D, a fact you only discover after you’ve finished putting the whole bed together and one leg is just a bit shorter than all the others.

With the recent opening of Brisbane’s second Ikea store and many other major retail stores such as Bunnings and Kmart jumping on the flat pack fad, thousands of the city’s residents are battling it out with a half-page of assembly instructions and the smallest Allan key known to man.

Help with flat pack furniture assembly

It doesn’t really have to be such a big drama, though. For those of us who struggle with flat pack assembly, there is help at hand. Many carpenters offer in-home flat pack furniture assembly services to remove the stress from the furniture building process.