Flatpackers
It's
a fact of life. Just one of those things, between,
vacations, tours and weekends away most of us have to spend some time at
home. Some will even have to work and/or study, well it helps to pass
the time between trips! An ever increasing number of my friends are
working less or have stopped working completely. A large portion of
their time is spent baby sitting, pottering in the garden, fixing
stuff around the house or building extensions. However none of these
activities are likely to be part of my daily programme. I don't have
grandchildren or a garden and nobody would mistake me for a handyman!
Yes I do take some pride in my ability to improvise sometimes quite
ingenious temporary running repairs at home or on the road but I'm not the person to ask if you want something intended to be
functional, attractive and durable. I have in the past written that I
am allergic to DIY stores and building merchants but that is not
completely true. I don't mind walking around them looking at boxes of nuts
and bolts or rolls of cables and chains and, like most men, I'm quite
happy to view rows of shiney tools, sturdy machines or smart electrical
gadgets. I may even hold some for a while....but I rarely feel the
urge to actually use them.
Unfortunately
this lack of ability or interest doesn't get me out of all household
tasks.
At
some point, usually when the late summer sun is shining through the
windows of our apartment, Yvonne, my partner, will point out that our
furniture is getting shabby, is beyond repair and needs replacing. I
may have noticed already but, knowing the consequences, I would have
kept quiet about it. You see some years ago, even though we'd had
some fun and satisfaction revitalizing and revamping second or third
hand items, we thought it was about time that we bought ourselves
some new furniture instead of filling our interior with other peoples
leftovers. We were, however, somewhat shocked to discover that we
actually had very expensive taste! Everything we really, really
liked was really, really expensive! Way above what we were prepared
to pay. Even if we had it we'd prefer to spend that amount on money
on something else.
So
that's how we became flatpackers!
Flat-pack
: furniture or equipment sold in pieces and assembled by the buyer.
It
comes mostly in flat cardboard packaging, hence the name.
A
visit to IKEA , which is probably the best known flat-pack furniture
manufacturer, involves navigating through endless twists, turns and
loops designed to take customers through every single department,
presumably in the hope that he, she or they will buy a double bed or
kitchen cabinet on impulse. For us it means that by the time we reach
the appropriate department we are bored, irritated, slightly
disorientated and regretting the whole thing. The fact that we are
not wildly enthusiastic about anything on display does not help.
However after much discusson we will manage to make a choice. Will we then buy
the furniture we have chosen? No we won't !
Yvonne
will suggest that we should go home and think about it. We go home.
The subject will not be mentioned again for a while, probably not
until the next time the late summer sun shines through the windows of
our apartment. At which point we will return to Ikea, negotiate our
way through all the irrelevant departments and, after the briefest
glance at some other bits and pieces, order the items that we had
supposedly been thinking about.
Now,
friends, there are a lot of jokes, grumbles and complaints
about assembling flatpack furniture but the truth is that with a
minimum of skill and modest intelligence it's really easy to
construct. Yes, even for me.
Despite
an ETD (estimated time of delivery) somewhere between eight a.m. and
infinity, the packages and boxes arrived early in the morning. With
only a slight loss of blood and hardly any bad language I had four
dining room chairs and two armchairs all ready for use before
lunchtime!
I
also had enough cardboard packaging to construct an imitation rain
forest, enough large plastic bags to carry half an ocean and six
identical Allen keys, five of them unused......
….and
all of the time I was thinking about where we could go for an Autumn
break.
