Although the individual bits of these Ikea shelves weren’t *that* heavy, I did wonder what the death rate is from self-assembly of Ikea furniture…
The thing is, you want rectangles, but you get parallelograms. Parallelograms which collapse rapidly sideways if you’re not careful, revealing the cumulative weight of those shelves, and prompting thoughts about death rates!
The problem with these shelves (from the IVAR range if you want to know) is that Ikea sell you side pieces (a bit like a ladder), and shelves (flat bits of wood), but they don’t sell you any right angles between them. They aren’t even (despite the catchy title of this entry) in flatpacks. While this makes it dead easy to load and unload the car, assembly is a different matter.
Of course there were the bracing metal crosspiece things (two thin rods joined in the middle, with holes at the ends and screws to go in them), which are essential, but the tricky bit is knowing *where* to fix them. And the only way to judge the right place (short of resorting to Maths) is to put the shelves in, to space the side pieces the right distance apart. But the shelves are tricky to insert and you’re very likely to dislodge the side pieces and send the whole lot crashing down sideways. You can’t even lean it against a wall because that means the whole lot isn’t straight.
And no, there aren’t any instructions either.
Eventually I did resort to measurement, if not maths, and tried to assemble the whole lot flat on its front on the ground. Even this is tricky as half of the pegs which hold the shelves up were now facing downwards and kept falling out. But (with the aid of sellotape to keep the pegs in place for at least a minute or so) eventually I measured it well enough to screw the cross-bracing in. Rotating it upright was tricky too, as any movement dislodged the shelves yet again, (meaning the whole lot collapses and you have to start again!) but eventually I got it upright.
Even then I wasn’t home and dry, as it turns out the crosspieces have a right and a wrong way round (they need to be flat against the wood, but the wrong way round they bow out). And of course, having discovered they were the wrong way round, undoing them brings back the risk of parallelogramming!
Once one was assembled, the rest were easy because:
(a) I had something solid to lean against and
(b) I now knew where to screw the crosspieces.
Hurrah!
