Aimster Learns That Being Swedish Doesn't Necessarilly Mean Being Better at Putting IKEA Furniture Together

When I bought my current bed I was right out of college and had no job, so money was a practical concern of mine. I decided to procure my sleeping vessel from the Store of My People, which is what I call IKEA because I am 25% Swedish (although I like to pretend that I am 100% because the Swedes are artistic and talented folk who are attractive and make damn good meatballs). At the Store of My People, I purchased a bed frame with the option of adding a nightstand on one or both sides. In the vein of price savviness, I opted to buy just one nightstand for the time being. Below is a picture of how it looks:

Despite my OCD-approaching love of symmetry, the one nightstand was working out pretty snazzily until April of the Year of Our Lord 2010. This abrupt change was due to the beginning of my relationship with Orongejello. Being the type of couple who sometimes like to relax at home, Orongejello and I would often buy a bottle of wine and enjoy it in bed whilst taking in a movie. When I didn’t feel like holding my wine glass, I would set it safely on my nightstand. When Orongejello didn’t feel like holding his wine glass, he would balance it precariously on random items in my room, where it sat in constant danger of spilling faster than oil in the Gulf.

Because Orongejello would probably do anything for me, I decided I could come close to matching that by buying and building another nightstand for him. Since he was still on his 7 week adventure, I thought it would make a nice surprise for his return, and hence I ventured to My People’s Store and picked one up. I also bought about 20 other things, because you just don’t know you need some items until you see them Swedish style. But I digress.

Last week I arrived home from work at an early enough hour to assemble the nightstand. I was pretty excited because I am a nerd who gets a kick out of putting things together, and since I can’t actually speak any Swedish, I feel connected to their language when I correctly interpret the wordless pictures in IKEA instruction manuals. I began by setting out all of the pieces, screws, and bolts and organizing them into neat little piles. I proceeded to piece the pieces together, and little by little the new nightstand was taking shape.

In case you’ve never lived in a college apartment before, which is another way of saying in case you’ve never assembled IKEA furniture before, you should know a few things about the process. Oftentimes, you will first insert a wooden peg in a hole (and no, I am not turning this into an innuendo-filled entry, that would be too easy and I like a challenge) that will match with a hole in another piece. When you put the pieces together, the peg holds them in place so that you can ram a screw through them both, thereby binding them together more permanently (there really is no way to say those things without making them sound sexual).

Everything was going just dandily for me. The nightstand came together quickly and looked swell. Then came the part where I had to attach it to the bed. The nightstand came with a metal piece that is designed to screw into the bottom of the bed and the bottom of the nightstand. I’ve attempted to illustrate it here:

 

If you can understand that terribly crude illustration, then hopefully the rest of this tale will make sense to you.

I was trying to figure out how to get the metal piece into the bottom of the bed when I suddenly remembered why I’d built the last nightstand with assistance from my tremendous brother David: this step was better designed for a constructionist with 3 hands.
Hand 1 – Holds metal piece against bed
Hand 2 – Holds screw against metal piece
Hand 3 – Uses screwdriver to put screw through metal piece and into bed

However, God did not see fit to build us with 3 hands, and I was home alone, though thankfully not lost in New York. Other solutions needed to be found.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that the best idea was to use my head in place of Hand 1. So I pushed the metal piece against the bottom of the bed with the side of my head, and contorted myself in a way where Hands 2 and 3 were being put to proper use. This was not an easy task. I had to move around a bit, once testing to see if my forehead made a better hand than my temple (it didn’t). The gap where the screws had to fit was so narrow I don’t think anyone with fingers rounder than highlighters could get in there. To make matters worse, one of the two screws I had to put in got stripped, and I didn’t have another one so I had to exert extra pressure on the screwdriver so it would have something to grip onto. For some reason, I was unable to push harder with Hand 3 without pushing harder with my head, so I came out of that with some unnecessary muscle tension. It probably looked a bit like this:

I chose that picture because the face is how I imagined staring down the architect of the metal piece. The screw didn’t even go in all the way, but I deemed it acceptable because I figured if 1 out of 2 screws is good then that’s satisfying enough (Hahaha) (that one was intentional so I wanted to make sure you knew to laugh). Plus the bad screw was still pretty deep (Hahaha again).

Bonding the nightstand to the metal piece was much simpler, since there was no miniscule gap between the metal and since the nightstand supported itself by fitting conveniently into the metal piece. The last step was to nail a small metal plate between the back of the headboard and the back of the nightstand like so:

I was all prepared to do this when I realized there were no holes on the back of either piece to indicate where the metal plate should go. I decided to enquire the knowledge of my roommates, who had since returned, and after sustaining their predictable laughter from my, “How do I make a hole where there is no hole?” query, they suggested using a nail to create one. That worked spiffily, although it was quite noisy. At that point, I thought I was done. Then I looked at my floor and realized that I still had 4 wooden pegs and no holes to put them in (it’s getting too easy again). I re-looked-at-the-pictures-in the instruction manual (I can’t say “reread” because there were no words to read), and I could not figure out a single place where I might have missed putting a peg. I shook the nightstand a few times and it seemed sturdy, so I opted to just ignore the extra pegs and chalk it up to the distribution machine giving me more pegs than I was supposed to have.

As is becoming a growing trend with my half-fails, I still consider my foray into construction to be a total success. I even put books on the nightstand shelf that I knew Orongejello would like.

The imprint from the metal piece has since faded from my head, by my pride sure hasn’t. The experience even bequeathed me with a potential title for my upcoming bestselling memoir, which I’ll write once the world realizes how meritorious I am:

25% Swedes Conquer All: Stories of a Quarter Scandinavian Kicking Ass and Taking Names.