You think assembling Ikea furniture is a quick and easy project. I’m pretty sure that most of the world considers assembling flat packed furniture like Ikea stuff to be at best an annoyance and at worst a frustrating hair-pulling experience involving many swear words.
Yet, Saturday afternoon I found myself thinking “hmm… I need something quick and easy to do to feel like I’ve accomplished something today.” Then I looked over at the Ikea boxes that had been sitting there since late November for my kitchen workbench and thought “that’s just the thing.”
Here’s why I think too much time with my fiber crafts has addled my sense of “normal” and led to such crazy thoughts as a spot of Ikea furniture assembly being a relaxing end to a Saturday afternoon:
– Everything I need for the Ikea furniture is in the box. No foraging around in my stuff for tape measures, stitch markers, or other little items. No waiting for time to go to the store to get buttons…
– The instructions are pictoral with every part you’re using carefully labelled. Compare this to instructions that might be more like k5 k2tog yo yo k2tog k2, turn, p8 and well… you don’t need to learn another language to assemble Ikea stuff.
– Similarly, because of the pictoral nature, you can see in advance how everything fits together. There are no leaps of faith that somehow this weird floppy shape will indeed turn onto a sweater. Nobody saying “don’t try to understand it – just follow the instructions. It all works, trust me.”
– Hand eye coordination – I have this one covered.
– Making stretchy clothing for our bendy 3D bodies means I have pretty decent spacial skills. Orienting pieces of wood that are already shaped and aren’t going to go anywhere after you secure them is way easier than understanding how to turn the heel on a sock to make the 3D shape you need.
– It’s really fast! I mean, an entire kitchen workbench in just 45min. That’s like, the time it takes to do a toe on a sock (if I don’t get distracted. Amazing how distracted I get when I’m down to just the toe of a sock).
I’ve done a few mental calculations, and even accounting for those items that required two people (so you need to double the time it took us for total work hours), I think we furnished our entire apartment in less time that it takes to do a pair of large socks.
Voila, my new kitchen workbench:
Complete with knitting storage space (very important to have on hand when you are baby-sitting something on the stove).