Instructions, screws and tools.
Moving house is detrimental to writing. In my spare time I have been carrying box after box up thirteen stairs, unpacking each of them, flattening the cardboard and taking that down to the stairs to the garage. At one point, I was wading through thigh deep cardboard to get to my letterbox.
The contents of the boxes all had to be distributed somewhere. I realised very quickly that my books would not fit in the number of shelves I had brought with me. A lovely large bookcase I wanted in the bedroom didn’t make it through the door and had to be manoeuvred back down. Another required four people to lift it over the balustrade to make it into the lounge room.
To avoid further such pitfalls, I joined the rest of today’s consumers and began to buy flatpack furniture. As there is only one of me, yet always two people indicated on the assembly instructions, it took me at least twice, if not thrice as long to get the job done. The items from the Swedish furniture giant were the easiest to assemble but didn’t always have all the bits needed. The assembly instructions from some of the smaller companies ranged from woeful to abysmal.
One set of shelves came with three screws to attach each shelf, but only two pre-drilled holes. That confused me for a while until I realised it was them and not me who had made the mistake. Left and right weren’t shown, yet required opposite pieces, holes were too large or too small to hold screws and the Allen keys provided were too short to do a complete turn.
My favourite piece, a rotating bookshelf, came with instructions in only Chinese. The pictures were miniscule and gave nothing away. Then, the QR code took me to a non-existent website, but I didn’t give up. The first set of shelves took me two and a half hours to put together, the second about an hour. Who would have ever thought that a battery drill would become a girl’s best friend?
I have finished putting all the pieces of furniture together now. I’m already beginning to forget some of the pain of crawling on the floor, trying to line up screws with pre-drilled holes, dropping Allen keys and losing my sanity, but not my dogged determination to get the job done. For now, the drill is resting in the dark recesses of a cupboard. Until next time…
From Quill to Quote 