Ms. Fix-It Goes Out of Business
I am a bright and capable woman. I have many talents. Clearly, furniture assembly is not among them. Back in September when we bought out basically an entire Ikea, among our loot was a set of six dining chairs. To date we have put together only three of them because they are so frustrating to assemble. Today I had some spare time, so I thought I'd bring us up to four. I thought wrong.
One of the reasons the chairs are so annoying to put together is that they require screwing in a long screw through a hole about the size of a quarter in the side of one of the wood pieces. This means that instead of just twirling your little L-wrench around, you can manage maybe a sixth of a turn before running into the wood piece and having to remove and reposition the wrench for another sixth of a turn. You have to do this four times for each chair. It takes forever.
I had three done, and the last one was taking extra forever, so I took everything apart again to see why. Turns out I had slipped the thread on the little metal thing the screw was supposed to be screwing into. Oops. But I figured that since the little metal thing was obviously comparatively soft I could probably get the screw through with the aid of a pair of pliers and sort of rethread it. This actually worked. The problem came when I couldn't unscrew it again to put them both back in their required positions in the chair. Oops again.
I think Beth should do all the building, assembling and fixing that needs to be done around here from now on. She's obviously better with an Ikea wrench than I am. I'll stick to the household chores that use tools I'm less likely to do damage with, like knives and fire.
One of the reasons the chairs are so annoying to put together is that they require screwing in a long screw through a hole about the size of a quarter in the side of one of the wood pieces. This means that instead of just twirling your little L-wrench around, you can manage maybe a sixth of a turn before running into the wood piece and having to remove and reposition the wrench for another sixth of a turn. You have to do this four times for each chair. It takes forever.
I had three done, and the last one was taking extra forever, so I took everything apart again to see why. Turns out I had slipped the thread on the little metal thing the screw was supposed to be screwing into. Oops. But I figured that since the little metal thing was obviously comparatively soft I could probably get the screw through with the aid of a pair of pliers and sort of rethread it. This actually worked. The problem came when I couldn't unscrew it again to put them both back in their required positions in the chair. Oops again.
I think Beth should do all the building, assembling and fixing that needs to be done around here from now on. She's obviously better with an Ikea wrench than I am. I'll stick to the household chores that use tools I'm less likely to do damage with, like knives and fire.