An IKEA Furniture Building Marathon

When I woke up this morning my hands resembled those of a man who had spent the previous day catching a lot of fast moving cricket balls. Indeed, my thumbs and palms felt like I had spent my Sunday standing in the slips while Dale Steyn bowled outswingers at tail-enders (American readers: ignore this sentence). Of course, I had not been playing cricket on a Chicago November afternoon. My sore hands were a result of an IKEA furniture building marathon at my girlfriend’s apartment.

The steadily decreasing number of IKEA virgins seem to get rather excited at the prospect of constructing Swedish furniture. However, once you have built your entire room from IKEA the glamour starts to wear off. There are some moments of joy - most of the tables can be transformed from box to furniture in a matter of minutes, leaving you convinced that you are a DIY savvy with the hands of a craftsman, despite the contrary evidence from the rest of your life. Unfortunately, some of the items can be a complete bitch. Case in point is the HEMNES 8-drawer dresser. For those of you who haven’t counted, the HEMNES 8-drawer dresser is comprised of no fewer than 377 separate parts. 377! To put that staggering figure into perspective, if every day you were to add one piece of wood, or screw in one screw, or hammer in one nail etc. then it would take you over a year to build the stupid dresser. It took us over three tiring hours to construct it.

After building a bed and the HEMNES dresser I was flagging and had to grind physically and mentally to tackle a table. My girlfriend had annoyingly elected to purchase one of those extending tables, which meant that unlike most of the IKEA tables I have tackled so far, this item was rather strenuous to construct. By this point I was battling through the soreness that had turned my hands red and every turn of the screwdriver was accompanied by the kind of grunting that I was partial to while playing tennis. Eventually I reached the end of the instruction booklet and with Eye of the Tiger blaring tensely from the speakers, we flipped the table upright. It slid apart compliantly to allow the extra planks to be inserted, and when extended to full length it immediately revealed itself as a perfect pong table. I was happy. Happy but bloody exhausted.     

The infamous HEMNES 8-drawer dresser and some of its many parts.