I love IKEA! When I travel to a new city that has an IKEA store in it, rest assured I will plan a visit there. Maybe it’s because I live in a city where there isn’t an IKEA outlet but my love for all things IKEA has no bounds. I can easily spend an entire day, wandering the various aisles and room layouts in an IKEA store, marvelling at how things can look cluttered yet chic at the same time. Needless to say, even after exercising immense self control, after each trip I leave the store with a whole load of stuff that I never knew I needed and there is always that one trolley or corner shelf that I am convinced is going to transform my life and change that messy art area at home into a calming, , catalogue-worthy zen-corner.

These days, I don’t even need to visit an actual IKEA store. Even browsing the website or an old catalogue does wonders for me. At this point I have usually completely forgotten about the most important step. The one right before the trolley starts to magically change your life. The part where you assemble your life-changing trolley. My experience assembling IKEA purchases has always been fraught with misadventure. I am a proud owner of a shoe rack that has a shoe falling out of its back every time you swing it shut, a little cupboard that has one door that opens a little wider than the other, and a lamp without a shade because, try as I might, I could never get the shade to stay on. On every occasion it has only been due to my fault as an assembler.

Very recently, after yet another bout of selective amnesia, I ordered among other things, a trolley. Yes, a trolley that was going to be life-changing. Life-changing indeed it was as soon as I unopened the package and embarked on the assembling journey, ably assisted by my nine-year-old. Every step of the assembly process was a life lesson.

Learning curve ahead

How you start can determine how the entire assembly process will pan out. We started assembling the trolley late in the evening, too close to dinner and when we were already tired after a long day because it seemed easy and we thought it would be done in no time. However, one hour later and only about halfway into the assembly process, the shelf of the trolley that should have slid in effortlessly, couldn’t even be forced in. Even though we thought we had followed the steps correctly, we had basically hit a dead end. We couldn’t figure out where the mistake was and how to fix it.

Lesson One: Starting right is so important to the success of any project big or tiny.

After battling with the shelf for another fifteen minutes and getting nowhere near to getting it to slide in smoothly, we reluctantly decided that the only way forward was to stop for dinner and start again the next morning.

Lesson two: Sometimes it is important to take a break.

After a good night’s rest, the next morning we were feeling very upbeat about assembling the trolley. Taking another look at it, we decided to dismantle what we had assembled and start over. It was far easier to do things right from the start than to try to correct a mistake by working backwards. This time, we quickly spotted the rogue screw that was preventing our shelf from sliding in.

Lesson three: Breaking down is not always a bad thing.

At this point, we also decided that we would check out some videos online to see if we missed something. There were many videos but the one that struck us the most was one where an 11-year-old boy did it entirely on his own with absolutely no problem. A closer, second look at the video and we noticed that the boy held the frame at an angle while fixing the screws and we decided to try the same and Voila! The errant screw went all the way in.

Lesson four: It’s all right to get help.

Reflecting on the process, it was fascinating how one little screw could make or break the success of the assembly process. Each member has to be at just the right place and at the right time for it all to work.

Lesson five: Every team member, even the smallest, is valuable.

Over our years of assembling IKEA furniture, one thing we learnt very early on in our journey was to take the instructions one step at a time and to never ever skip any step. You may think it looks simple and may be tempted into believing that skipping a step will speed things up but beware.

Lesson six: One step at a time. You skip one little step and your shoes could be falling out of the back of your shoe rack for the rest of your foreseeable future and one day you will get so fed up that you will decide to follow ‘lesson three’ and pull the whole thing apart and start over.

Possibly the most important lesson was...

Lesson seven: Enjoy the journey. The more you look at it as a necessary evil to get to the trolley of your dreams, the more likely you are to be frustrated. But the moment you decide to enjoy how all the pieces come together one tiny little screw could hold it all together, the process can be rewarding and not just because of the life changing trolley at the end of it.

The writer is a chartered accountant

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