Flatpackers

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.