Last week I moved into a new apartment, which required buying enough IKEA to make an unfurnished apartment livable.
In this post I look at some of the items I bought, discuss anything noteworthy about them and show some timelapses of building them. Note that throughout this post, I wil use "IKEA" as an uncountable noun, referring to a colelction of items from everyone's favourite Swedish meatball store.
When I landed after a 15 hour flight back from Dubai my first job was to pick up my truck, already filled with IKEA. After a run-in with a bugee strap I was on my way to my new place.
Upon arrival I needed to unload my truck.
Once this was done I built my bed - if I turned out to be too tred to build eveything, at least I'd have something to sleep on.
This bed is a
Neiden, a basic double bed. It was relatively easy to assemble, although several pieces look very similar, so some care is required. I found the long socket screws were easiest to drive with an impact driver, as with an allen wrench they take ages.
The legs have their screw holes at different heights on each side - this allows the same leg-piece to be used for all four corners, an elegant touch.
Next up was a chair, so I had something to eat my dinner in. The
Poäng armchair is a stalwart that no colelction of IKEA is complete without. They're very comfortable, surprisingly strong, and a pain to assemble.
They use both M4 and M5 screws, both with the same head and length. To a casual observer, they look like one kind of screw. After much mucking around, and an ill-fated attempt at drilling more generous clearance holes, I realised I was using the wrong screws, trying to fit an M5 bolt in an M4 hole. After some cursing, the chair then went together quite quickly.
After a week with these chairs, they're still proving comfortable, although for prolonged sitting they're not ideal, as they don't give you much option to reposition yourself. I also bought a
matching "otterman" (footstool, to the layman), but that was too simple to warrant a timelapse.
My next build was a
Tarva nightstand, a plain little wooden table with a drawer.
This might be the first time I've used a spanner whilst building IKEA - the legs are attached using M8 bolts. This meant I got to get out the ratchet spanner I bought for assembling my
truss.
Finally came a
Tarva chest of 5 drawers. It was nice to see the same components used in the drawers as the nightstand - given their difference in size, I wasn't expecting this.
The back of these drawers are a sheet of 15mm MDF, giving a really solid construction. One thing that really annoyed me was the safety sticker, instructing the user to attach the item to the wall to prevent tippage. Wilst I have no problem with the sentiment, The label was practically impossible to remove, and was about A4 sized.
As usual, IKEA have produced some nice pieces, that are relatively easy to assemble and their reuse of components is smart, as always. I contemplated using wood glue to make the joints more permanent, but felt that they were best assembled as IKEA intended - I'll post an update on how these items last unglued.
