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Comment by scotth | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I'm not sure where the misconception of their furniture being difficult to build comes from. In my experience their instructions are unambiguous and well-designed.

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I can't agree more, for the furniture I have bought, Ikea's instructions are pretty exemplary.

Without any written words, the instructions are very clear on how to assemble the furniture.

If you pay attention when reading them, it is not possible to make a mistake.

On the other hand, I have also bought from other RDA furnitures and have encountered some obscure instructions.

> If you pay attention when reading them

Ah, that's the problem. We all know that users never read the manual. :)

There's a difference between building "your one desk" and assembling 10 of them for the new company office. It gets old after a few hours :P

Ikea furniture and instructions are Lego of the furniture world. Anyone with half a brain and some patience can assemble it.

I also like that you don't need to be a literate person to assemble their furniture (wordless instructions).

They are. The times I've been caught were clearly my mistake. Those times and various close calls have been cases of almost symmetry. I've also done things like building two identical units in series or parallel and watched myself learn. I can imagine a great speed up with practice. An apartment's worth of furniture could take me a day, and I can well imagine paying someone $100 for an hour instead.

From 30 years ago.

Seriously, at that time the instructions came in gibberish with extremely weird illustrations and you were usually wondering why you had surplus screws.

The design of IKEA furniture at that time was, let's just say, a lot more rustic too.

I put together a couple of wardrobes for a friend which was fine, but she still had to get a genuinely useful person in to drill them together and attach to wall etc as I lacked the tools.

It's not particularly difficult but nor is it particularly fun. I certainly don't plan to assemble the furniture for my next apartment myself.

But is that because you'll pay someone to assemble similar furniture, or because you'll buy better furniture that isn't just IKEA flat-packs?

I came to the same conclusion as morgante, next time I'd rather pay for assembly instead of doing it for myself for a whole weekend.

It reads like you plan to get entirely new furniture when you move. What’s wrong with the furniture you already own?

I don't currently own any furniture. For the past few years, I've been moving every month or two and never acquired any furniture.

Ah, ok. That makes more sense!

Reminds me of a funny story. I'd give up smoking and was on day 3. It took me several hours and I had a desk but almost looked inside out by the time I'd finished.

Otherwise, it's quite relaxing. I find it enjoyable. The times I see people struggle is when they eschew the instructions.

Yes, but they're sometimes also heavy, or would benefit from more than one person working on it at a time.

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