Oh, the joys of flat packing!

Oh, the joys of flat packing!

In London at the moment, I ordered a couple of lamp tables from a well-known and highly reputable department store chain. Yesterday they were delivered.

The price should have warned me. Whereas a lot of the bedside furniture on display in the store had price tags to make the eyes not just water but positively gush, those chosen were about the same price as a pub lunch with a couple of glasses of whatever takes your fancy.

So what arrived via furniture van were not, as expected, a couple of tables, but a couple of flat packs.

As a child, I played with Meccano, a wonderful construction toy that was a sort of generalised flat pack, from which toy cranes, model trucks with working steering and even rotary engines could be constructed from bits of metal with holes in and a variety of things that fitted in those holes, like screws and axles. The point is that I was trained early in life to make things out of odd bits through following instructions.

Each pack contained five lumps of wood with holes of various sizes drilled into them, sixteen bits of dowelling, twenty screws, eight very odd lumps of metal, four small cubes of wood, various stick-on things and two tubes of glue. And six pages, yes, six pages of instructions. “This item takes one person fifteen minutes to assemble,” was emblazoned on the first page. It took me that long to read the instructions.

Now we’re off, with the first few screws going in fine, and then there is the inevitable one that goes in at the wrong angle, the one that the slot for the screw driver is missing and the tube of glue that explodes when I try to squeeze the glue out.

Finally it’s done. It took me an hour and half – to make the first one.

Was it worth it? Well there was a sense of pride at the result, which looked as it should do and now does “what it says on the tin”. But an hour and half? For a supposedly fifteen minute job??

I’ll be back in Lebanon soon, where you can buy finished articles. Maybe I just haven’t been looking hard enough, but I haven’t seen a flat pack there - yet.