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Comment by xxs | Hacker News Reader

What's the assembly time based on?

IKEA in general is piss easy to assemble except for leveling stuff where you'd need a laser and often times another person. Some of provided tools (the famous L 6mm hex key made of cheese) and hardware (nails) tend to be very poor... and sometimes it'd need a visit to buy extra hardware - e.g. low-profile head, non-counter sunk screws to attach to the wall.

Repairing furniture or addressing mistakes tend to be fixable by a mix of wood shavings/dust and epoxy in most cases.

So the assembly would depend on previous experience, available tools, and free space.

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> piss easy to assemble

Sure, it’s not hard, but if there are a lot of steps it’s still going to take longer.

A fully specced up pax double wardrobe with drawers, sliding doors, and lighting is made up of hundreds of parts, so does take a good amount of time to put together even though it’s not difficult per se.

It’s also made up of many different SKUs so you get dozens of boxes turn up and it takes a little while to figure out what everything is and get organised. Again, it’s not difficult, but it takes a little time.

The Pax with sliding doors took me a really long time to put together. Long enough that when my brother in law (who doesn’t like assembling stuff) asked if I recommend them, it was a solid No.

Yeah, we ordered a double width pax with sliding doors, drawers, shelves and lighting, plus another half wardrobe with a mirror door, shelves, and lighting.

I’m fairly handy and quite enjoy putting things together so it never crossed my mind to use IKEA’s assembly service, but I did notice they were offering it for £300, which I took as a signal that it would take a while.

In the end it took 12+ hours over the course of a weekend. I reckon I’d be faster if I did it again, and maybe if I did it enough times I’d be able to half that, but the problem is, how many fully spec Ed pax wardrobes + ancillaries are you really going to assemble in your life?

With bigger orders, depending on how you value your time and want to spend it, maybe paying for assembly makes sense. I reckon 2 people would have had it done in a morning if I’d paid.

That said. The wardrobe is still there and working great many years later.

Yeah, what convinced me was seeing friends’ setup that they’d had for 10 or 15 years still working flawlessly.

> it’s still going to take longer.

I never said otherwise, and the rest of my post tells it could be time consuming. The criticism is to the random time quote based off solely on parts count.

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