There are websites devoted to Ikea Hacking ie customising their furniture to suit your needs. One of the simplest ways of making any flat pack furniture look a lot better is to buy good quality handles and use these instead.

Today we assembled some items from Ikea’s Hemnes Range.

The Hemnes range is solid wood,  but quite light weight and painted in some basic colours white stain, navy black

All items come with the same black knobs for the drawers and doors. These are functional,  provide a good contrast and comparible with the quality of the furniture.

For this customer she had chosen some good quality knobs from B & Q to replace those on her Hemnes items.  At the time of writing these cost £12 for a pack of 6.

If you look at these two chests side by side you can clearly see the improvement in the finished effect.

As well as a couple of bedside tables the customer also had an 8 drawer Hemnes chest as shown below.

These were the handles used:

Furniture assembly is a cottage industry, but with more and more people entering the business some form of accreditation is required to give the general public confidence that their chosen assembler is bonafide and knows what they are doing.

At present there are no standard qualifications in assembling furniture. So with 15 years experience, I thought I would put one together, you can only pass the tests if you have experience assembling a wide range of furniture regularly.

I’ve also trawled the BSI standards to collate as much of the legalisation as I can. Simple things like where and how slats are fastened on the top bunk of a bunk bed are prescribed by law. Your assembler should know this. So I have written a guide covering the key points and there is a test to pass.

E-Commerce legislation stipulates that everyone and every business advertising online, must provide their full name (or limited company, company number and directors names), telephone number, email address and postal address plus their VAT No (if registered). Only genuine traders will provide all this information on their website. We do not insist on this (because we do not want out of date info) but ask all our registered assemblers to provide an internet link to where the public can find it, ie on their website, Facebook page etc.

We’ll be adding a few more features to help build confidence in future, but for now we are keeping it simple to get as many people on board as possible.

Today I came across the Darwin soft close device. I have not seen it for a while, because very few people buy it, but it is quite a nifty adaptation for the Darwin chest of drawers.

Very often when I see Ikea add on ideas, they are very Heath-Robinson type affairs where they don’t really work that well. For example, the original Pax sliding doors released about 15 years ago, had the most convoluted way imaginable of securing the glass panels in the metal frame, which in the long run proved unsatisfactory. The lighting system on the Pax wardrobes is also poorly thought out, as there is no neat or obvious way of hiding the wires, or even getting them outside the frame.

There are many more add ons that make you sigh when you see them, however these Darwin soft close devices are lovely. They simply clip on the bottom of the drawer and find the brackets on the frame with ease. The system is easy to apply and just works.

About 3 years ago, Ikea released the Sondheim wardrobe, I was quite surprised by this as it was very similar n many respects to the Dombas wardrobe. However there are some fundamental differences.

The Dombas wardrobe does not have a good quality finish, and has one cumbersome door that is larger than the rest. Additionally the assembly technique is like a cheap piece of furniture from Argos.

In contrast the Sondheim has a much nicer cleaner white finish, and also has an assembly technique which is up their with the usually good cheap and effective quality you would expect from Ikea.

It seems that earlier this year the Dombas price was dropped from about £180 to £60, so they are clearly getting rid of the stock and intend to withdraw it at some point soon.

This is an incredibly contemporary and stylish bed from Dwell. I built one this morning and it looks fabulous.

The instructions for assembly leave a lot to be desired though. The main idea is that you build the bed base and build the head board and then slot the two pieces together. Nothing wrong with that you may think but there is. Due to its weight you need two people to lift the head board and probably a third person to line up the bolts and dowels, which need to come together at a handy 45 degree angle. Now bearing in mind there are three bolts and three dowels on each side, even if you were to attempt this it would be fraught,  since I doubt both sides would line up nicely and you would need a decent amount of lateral force as well as downward force to bring the two pieces together.

In my opinion the correct way to build this is using my standard “let gravity do the work for you” approach and build it in a logical manner piece by piece. This was the first one I had seen and it took my 90 minutes but I think second time around I could build it in about an hour on my own, yes on my own.

I’ll be writing some instructions on how to do this with photos and so on which will be available soon at Dwell Furniture Help.

The bed however is beautiful, the finish is glossy, expensive and ultra-glamorous.

One activity which is well worth while is visiting Flatpack Assemblers to get some Voucher Codes. All you need to is

1. Select an assembler’s area by postcode at the top of the page.
2. On the next page enter your email in the box at the top.

You will be emailed a link to a list of retailers including:-

High Street Names: B&Q, Barker & Stonehouse, British Home Stores, Debenhams, Dreams, Focus DIY, Habitat, John Lewis, Laura Ashley, Marks & Spencers

Popular Internet Retailers: Bedstar, Furniture 123, Furniture Village, Garden Bargains, Nabru, Oak Furniture Land, Oak Furniture Solutions, Pinesolutions, Space2, Super Tramp, Sleeping Solutions

Offers cannot usually be used on sale items and are time limited, but can save you 5-10% off your next  furniture purchase!

In many cases people want a wardrobe to fit into a small space. In such cases most people will pick sliding door wardrobes, since hinged doors can obscure the space. One thing often overlooked when purchasing a wardrobe is how it can be built?

This wardrobe from Furniture 123 is an ideal example:-

Blithe 3 door wardrobe in dark walnut

Most hinged flatpack wardrobes are designed to be built lying down whilst most sliding door flatpack wardrobes are designed to be built standing up. Sliding door wardrobes will also tend to have the back panel fit into a groove rather than be nailed on, again to help assembly in a tight space. This is the general rule however there are two notable exceptions:

IKEA Wardrobes - All Ikea wardrobes should be built lying down and then standing. They can be built standing up but you will need either two people, a self made jig or a lot of skill and experience. With the Holborn range Ikea often provide a small square of hardboard which can be used, but this is not provided with the standard PAX range. Another point with Ikea’s wardrobes is that you have to nail on the back panels. This means if you do built them standing up, you need space and then need to push them back against the wall. This is not too difficult if you are experienced, but considering their weight and space, it could be too taxing for some in a small space.

Dwell - most of these wardrobes have a rather complex construction and are generally best constructed on their sides. This means they are often unsuitable for assembling standing up in a tight space.

Harvey’s have announced that they are pulling out of Bedroom furniture to concentrate on lounge and dining furniture. This is a real shame because the sliderobe wardrobes they sold from Rauch were great value for money and provided excellent storage space.

Harvey’s are having a clearance sale and if you are lucky enough to get your hands on one you’ll need to assemble it!

I have written a set of instructions on my Flat Pack Advice website available here

However if you want someone to build it for you, check out my website for further details of a local assembler. Just so you know:

• London: call Brendan Clinton on 07971 949 424
• Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cumbria and West Yorks: Edwin Cooke - 07929 975 809
• North Wales, Chester, Liverpool & The Wirral: Nik Griffiths - 07737 934 639

Ikea have recently introduced a range of mattress systems to provide excellent lumber support and a good night’s sleep.

The main difference from an assembly perspective is that the slats that can be purchased for a wide variety of their beds are different to traditional slats.

Traditional Slats are supplied on a roll, where each slat is connected via two strips of fabric, so you can simply roll them onto the bed frame and in less than 60 seconds the bed is complete.

The newer Sultan slats need individual assembly, and contain multiple parts, suffice to say of the two systems available, both take around one to one and a half hours to assemble! This makes a big difference if you are paying a Flatpack Assembler to do it for you!

The slats that fall into this category are:

• Sultan Lillaker
• Sultan Lovene
• Sultan Landon
• Sultan Mane

The following photographs illustrate the additional complexity involved.

1) This is one of the rubber lugs that three of the slats will eventually slide into:

2) This is one of the side peices, the rubber lugs slide into these as shown in the next photo and these are assembled to form the basic frame:

3)

4) Here you can see the slats are slid into the rubber legs and the system starts to build:

5) Of course it isn’t that simple! A fabric ribbon, is also present to keep the slats aligned and this makes putting on each slat quite difficult/fiddly. Although I haven’t shown a photo of it here, some of the slats are doubled up for extra support and this is awkward to say the least to assemble.

6) The final slats all assembled:

Unless you have the patience of a saint and are good with yiour hands you will find this excruciatingly annoying. I know I did the forst time I did one! Further more the more complex systems with bends in them and so forth (such as the Landon and Mane) are even more tricky.

So the delivery truck arrives with all your possessions, and you start directing them to the relevant rooms in your marvelous new home.

When they have gone a few things start to dawn on you, that maybe you hadn’t thought of:

- I need curtains in the bedrooms
- I need to put my clothes and other things away
- I’m tired and hungry!

Yes everything is upside down and you need some order. You can’t even cook, so it is off to the chippy!

You can’t begin to start putting things away until all your furniture is in place and these days this often means assembling flat pack furniture and getting out the screwdriver if you can find it!

Time is the biggest enemy when moving house, and assembling your new furniture takes a lot of time. If you don’t do this sort of thing often it could take you all day to assemble a couple of wardrobes and beds, several days to do more furniture. Very few people have a good idea of how long it takes.

You are also stressed and frustrated so this probably is not a good time to have a hammer and a screwdriver in your hands!

Why not instead, just get some one in?

Pay a flatpack assembler to arrive and assemble all your new flat pack furniture, maybe even the day before your stuff arrives, so you can start putting stuff away immediately after you move in.

Not only will it be done properly and look how it should look, but you will avoid another stressful task!