DIY, O Y O Y?

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I’m almost cer­tain that it was fin­ished con­sid­er­ably quicker than the two fiendishly com­plic­ated flat­pack ward­robes I had to put together this week­end. And put together all on my own, I might add (sniff). I even allowed myself a wry smile when it came to mov­ing the half-finished ward­robe into its upright pos­i­tion, as the instruc­tion leaf­let screamed “PLEASE SEEK THE ASSISTANCE OF ANOTHER PERSON AT THIS POINT!” Well, what was I sup­posed to do? Shout out of the win­dow at a passing ped­es­trian to see if they could spare me half an hour of their time?

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that, like so much else in this cruel and heart­less world, flat­pack ward­robes aren’t inten­ded for single people. It’s yet another con­spir­acy against those of us who aren’t in a couple, like mort­gages and din­ner parties. Or something.

Of course, part of the prob­lem with these two flat­pack ward­robes from hell, which I believe required an engin­eer­ing degree to con­struct swiftly and suc­cess­fully, was that they didn’t come from the ubi­quit­ous and all-conquering temple to min­im­al­ist interior design that is IKEA. Unlike the last time I was buy­ing fur­niture for a new flat, on this occa­sion I had neither the time nor the inclin­a­tion to hike all the way to my local Swedish enormo-store and then work out how to get my pur­chases home without a car. Besides, as we all know, IKEA is just another ele­ment in that afore­men­tioned world­wide con­spir­acy against the unat­tached, and it exists solely for the pur­pose of mak­ing the lone shop­per feel bad as they attempt to nav­ig­ate one of the industrial-sized trol­lies round the self-service aisles.

I’ve learned my les­son now, how­ever, because I’ve real­ised that whilst the build­ing of these par­tic­u­lar ward­robes required more tools than I think I’ve ever actu­ally pos­sessed in my entire life, not to men­tion a fair amount of brute force to shove one part of the ward­robe into another part where the holes provided were far too small, the lovely products from IKEA usu­ally seem to require noth­ing more than a screw­driver and pos­sibly a rudi­ment­ary know­ledge of how to ham­mer a few nails into some wood. Any fool can put an IKEA item together — even me.

So after almost two solid days of high intens­ity screw­ing (no, please, don’t applaud the piti­ful innu­en­dos), I now have blisters on my fin­gers. That was my week­end. I think I need a week off now.

(Oh, and next time I move home, remind me not to even con­sider accept­ing any prop­erty that doesn’t have built-in ward­robes. Life really is far too short to spend hours get­ting thor­oughly con­fused by impen­et­rable flat­pack instruc­tion manuals.)