Self-assemble furniture not all its cracked up to be
I’m sitting on the basement floor, surrounded by 30 pieces of metal. The array of tubes and screws and bolts rolling around on the hard floor are noisy, clanging proof of my delusional optimism.
We were setting up a new bathroom for my daughter and she needed something to hold her towels. Home stores are filled with such things, cages and racks of all shapes and heights that flirt from around every corner. I stood in that department for long moments, perusing the selection. I would base my decision on two criteria: a) was the box light enough for me to lift into the car, and b) would I have to put it together?
Nothing worth owning offered both, and so I opted for the lighter option that still promised it would be easy to assemble. And why shouldn’t I have believed it; the bathroom rack was a simple-enough metal tower just four feet tall with three shelves.
Buying do-it-yourself furniture is one of the more hopeful things we do. It’s almost a cultural cliché — the father-to-be laboring over the pieces of a crib while the greatly pregnant wife watches from a rocking chair in the corner.
I opened and upended the towel rack box, spilling the contents onto the concrete floor with a bright clang. Four long metal tubes, two arched tubes, three mental shelves and 1.2 million screws and bolts, and a booklet of assembly instructions.
Which was written in English, sort of. The language was goofy, but there were drawings, and so I began.
You know you’re in trouble when the thing you’re putting together comes with its own tool — in this case a tiny Phillips screwdriver. The screws it would attach were so small, apparently, that only this very special tool would do.
And so, I sat in the middle of all the metal and began. My goal would be to use up all the pieces and end up with something that resembled the photo on the box.
Tube would slide into tube and then screw would hold it all in place. The diagram’s scale was way off, with the tubes depicted as the size of phone poles and the screws tiny fleas attacking it from the sides.
I once built a wooden Ikea bookshelf, employing an electric drill and a dose of misplaced confidence. I’d put the top shelf in upside down and backwards, an obvious goof that remained for years. To fix that part would have required dismantling the whole works.
My partner teases that I don’t function in the physical world and I tease back that I’m too cerebral for that. He’s built whole wings on houses. That towel rack would take him four minutes, tops.
But I was going on hour two. I’d get one side assembled, lean it against the wall while I collected the screws and then returned to find it had collapsed. At one point, I strained my neck while using my chin to hold one tube steady while I screwed in another. I tossed the instructions aside and following the photo on the box. Isn’t that how Legos work?
Finally, I’d used up all the tubes and shelves and all but a few of the screws. Unfortunately, I’d built a bicycle.
Tired and sore from sitting on the hard floor, I gave up for the night. My partner took over the next day, finishing the rack in ten minutes.
He never looked at the instructions, or even the picture on the box. Showoff.
Beth Dolinar is a writer, documentary producer and college professor. Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and on WQED-TV. Born and raised in southwestern Pennsylvania, Beth has degrees from Cal U and from Northwestern University. She and her family live in the Pittsburgh area. Her column appears twice a month in the Herald-Standard. Beth can be reached at bdolinar@aol.com