Except for IKEA executives, they would spend 4 years assembling the cabinet.
i like this joke.
i have bought furniture from ikea, and they all have eight screws and take five minutes to put together.
is the idea of difficult Ikea furniture assembly solely created by stand-up comedians or did assembly used to be genuinely more difficult?
I’ve owned plenty of Ikea in my life and it kinda just depends. Most of it’s well-designed but poorly machined so the more complex it is, the more likely you are to get two dowel holes that only barely line up or a screw hole that wasn’t drilled. Most times, you’ll encounter no issues at all. And other times, you’ll be like me and have to deal with the Norberg, a bastard of a shelf that took me, an experienced woodworker with an entire shop of tools at my disposal, two days and three different screw types to hang on the wall.
I find them easy but IKEA furniture is pretty simple compared to a decent size Lego set.
People say “IKEA” as a shortcut to saying flatpack furniture in general. Actual IKEA brand stuff is pretty good, but I’ve assembled some horrible stuff from other brands.
I’ve assembled a bed from Emma (German brand) that took me 3 days to assemble.
It was awful. It did not have instructions In it, just a QR code that redirect on a websitz with ALL the manuals. Then when you find your bed you have to naviagte between 10 different versions depending of the options you have, they all look similar but have different assembly.
Then when you finally assembled your first corner, you think it will be easy for the other 3 but no, they used a totally different assembly method for the next corner for no reason.
Instead of the 40 identical length dowel pins I had 50 pins in 3 different sizes, knowing that the longest don’t fit in all holes so if you only use the shorts one at the end you are stuck with the long one you can’t use.
…
This was pure garbage, IKEA on the other is so satisfying to assemble.
Some people don’t have good spatial reasoning skills and/or suck at reading and following instructions.
Fair point, though spacial reasoning and following instructions can be developed, i don’t think they’re have-it-or-you-don’t situations.
I’m sure people who aren’t naturally gifted at those skills get frustrated more quickly.
back to the original question, have you put together any Ikea furniture and do you find it genuinely difficult or do you think it used to be more difficult in the past?
I don’t buy ikea because i prefer things that last. We already have tons of waste as a species. I don’t need to add more to it than necessary.
I think Ikea furniture has become synonymous with all pre-fab, assemble your self furniture.
In my personal expirence with larger items (non-ikea) like desks, the assembly itself is super easy. The time consuming part is sorting out 100 pieces and realizing towards the end that the picture book didn’t tell you one part had a specific direction to go.
Soon after it was formed, somebody dubbed Finland’s current government coalition the IKEA cabinet
-took seven weeks to assemble
-barely holds together
-leans heavily to the right
Are you German perhaps?
