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Dad, Swearing And Flat Pack Furniture
It's one of the biggest annoyances of modern life. Furniture in a flat box with an incomprehensible set of instructions, still it's better than DFS.
I have been sat in the living room at my parents house now for a good half an hour. My brother nor my dad has said a word to me, other than “what the fuck is wrong with you?” when my quest to get an ashtray went horribly wrong and ended with fag buts all over their half completed flat-pack furniture.
Flat- pack furniture. This is the reason for our lack in communication. In the past half an hour I have heard the words, “fuck pig screws”, “fucking great big screws”, “piece of shit”, and a few other variations including the word screw.
Why do we do it to ourselves? Flat pack furniture only ever disappoints, I don’t know a single person that gets home after an IKEA shop and smacks their hands together, slaps a massive grin on their face and squeals with excitement at the thought of a set of instructions patronising you for hours until you finally have to get rid of them and improvise. The worst part of my dads quest to build his new TV cabinet is that it wasn’t even from IKEA, it was from habitat, and it cost quite a lot. It even got delivered. Couldn’t they have built it THEN delivered it?
I will be very happy when this habitat-furniture-building-saga is over and we can all be asked five times each time we come round whether or not we like the new TV cabinet that took an age to build.
The building finally finished and the TV was added, the family living room all the more glossy and idyllic. My dad stepped back, sighed and said, “That was the hardest flat pack cunt I’ve ever done.”
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COMMENTS
I don't know what's wrong with people. I love putting that shit together.
I agree Ikea is fun and easy. I do like swearing though, especially in my mother tongue...
Same. It's the only enjoyable part of anything IKEA related.
I find that a slight tantrum following the initial i) laying out of components, ii) First few connections, clears the head. It's all joy from there on out.
Ikea furniture is incredibly ingenious in its ease of construction. I particularly like the absence of glue.
I remember once spending an entire Saturday afternoon trying to put an Ikea bed together for my little girl (ridiculous thing; canopy, steps, crawlspace underneath) and realising very early on that the instruction manual was complete and utter bollocks. I had to piece it together like a puzzle, and when I finally cracked it and got the damn thing built I was over the moon, cheering, yelling, jumping around shouting "Yes! Yes! Fookin' YESSSSS!" Must have seemed a bit insensitive of me as, two minutes earlier, England had crashed out of the 2006 World Cup on penalties. It's a wonder the house didn't get firebombed.
I LOVE building flat pack. I am excited when I get home from Ikea. we have recently moved house and I have been able to feed my passion. Due to circumstance, I was unable to build some flatpack we had delivered for a week and it was there....in it's boxes...waiting...calling to me...The joy of using all those pictures with no words to create SOMETHING out of all those pieces of wood like stuff and bitS of metal, armed only with a screwdriver, hammer and allan key...I have a way into that "closed shop" of "world of bloke"...YES...NEXT THE TOOL CORALE AT B&Q...HAHAHA
Superb I go apeshit at that stuff. Shagging shaglets was one of my famous quotes along with Jesus fuck sticks! The good lady knows to go out when any DIY is attempted
Like you, I haven't got the patience to do a two-piece jigsaw. The thought of trying to put together flat pack furniture makes me feel sick.
My mum made sure that I was going to keep up with my brother in knowing how to 'get things done', so from an early age I knew how to change an electrical plug, whack various things with a hammer, operate a paraffin heater without blowing the house up, mend a car radiator with chicken wire, polyfiller and chewing gum (it does work) and various other non-girly activites. Nowerdays, with a disabled husband, my repertoire by necessity has extended to plumbing, laying carpets and fixing wheelchairs when they go wrong. Which they do. A lot. (One of the older wheelchairs he had, one of the wheels was always falling off. That's the equivalent of an able person's leg falling off on a regular basis. Despite my prowess in wheelchair profanity, that was beyond me, we had to call the local garage to come and winch him to safety.) My handbag contents consist of screwdrivers, allen keys, fuses and assorted bits of wire. Despite all this I loathe flatpack furniture. I've built enough in my time but there's always something that doesn't fit, incomprehensible instructions, bits left over and the tiniest tube of glue ever fucking invented. Maybe to actually enjoy it you really do have to be a bloke.
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