Once upon a time, Ikea is my furniture palace. Their design is fresh and chic. Their price is low. The flat packaging is easy to carry home. But as I grow, I find their design does not cut it anymore. The construction is flimsy. The materials are cheap. And the design look fake. Their price is not even that low compare to other furniture with better quality.

One thing starts to irritate me is the assembly. I don't expect this to irritate me as I am always quite handy. I have built some simple furniture myself. Just putting a kit together should not be a problem. This time though I have find my match. This Svärta metal bed frame is legendary onerous to put together.

Look at this step below. Your goal is to fasten a metal strip to the horizontal bar of the frame. You have to use a 3 parts fastener. You put a rivet nut 100673 through a metal tube that seems to serve no function. On the other side you fasten it with a screw 112548. To make the screw to meet the nut is much harder that it looks. Not to mention you have to hold the long metal strip into place while you are doing that. I failed many many times, dropping the parts on the floor over and over again.

Finally I fixed both end of the strip to the frame. I move on to another similar strip. I found that I was missing a metal ring. After searching for a while, I have a suspicion where it might be. Shaking the bed frame confirms that a ring has unfortunately fell inside the frame's hollow tube during one of the failed attempt to screw them. Damn! How am I going to fish it out of the tube through the small hole! A lot of struggle and ingenuity was needed before I can pull fish thing out. And to add insult to injury, the same accident happened over and over again during the course of assembly.

This was not the only challenge. Several other tricky steps means I have to spend 2-3 hours in total to assemble it. Even blood has been shed for this thing. Some pre-drill holes turn out to be too small to fit the screw. Ultimately I have to drill a large hole to get the screw in. But before that, I tried to turn the screw with force. The attempt was futile. Unbeknownst to me the force has created some tiny metal shaving around the hole. The shaving is really sharp and I cut myself on it. After several days my finger still has not fully healed. By now I hope you can understand why I detest the Svärta bed frame.

Over the years I have assembled many flat packaged furniture. I understand it is more economic because it save on shipping and warehouse cost. I expect to do some work as a bargain. But putting together this kitchen cart gain me a new perspective.

Here your goal is to assemble two racks. There are 10 slats on each rack, fixed to the two rail by 30 dowels and two screws. With some effort, you can stabilized all the lose parts and screw them together. This forms a rack. From what I can tell, a rack has a flat shape. What couldn't Ikea just package the rack assembled in one piece instead of excessive assembling of many small pieces? Flat is just not flat enough for Ikea. They insist on squeezing out every single inch of air they possibly can. In doing so they shows that their bottom line is more important than my time. When others do not respect my time it gets me angry.

2014.09.30 comments