Flat-pack furniture: fail or frugal?

I’ve loved constructing things for myself every since I was allowed (maybe aged 7 or so) to play with my dad’s Meccano set, Swiss chalet and electric train. My husband looks to me to organise things and follow the instructions when we make something together, and my step-dad leaves my mum and me to the constructing tasks as we are the ones who enjoy them and they are bewildering to him. :0)

I can’t say, however, that I’m a particular fan of flat-pack. For example I have bought ready-made (and pre-loved) furniture from charity shops and it was nice to be able to just plonk them in place right away.

Over the years I have assembled quite a lot of ‘self-assembly’ furniture and generally been satisfied with the results. Quality and precision have improved enormously over the years such that nowadays it is often impossible to tell by looking at it that a piece of furniture arrived in multiple pieces. There was a time when the instructions were completely unintelligible, the exploded diagrams were probably for a different product, and the finishes were crude and unattractive. Generally, as Rachel says, there was no structural rigidity and it formed a rhomboid shape until the back sheet was fitted with a hundred pins to hold the whole thing together. My earliest attempt was when I was eighteen, still living at home, and I put together a handy piece of furniture with a central bookcase and a cupboard at either side. Although it was quite basic with low-density chipboard covered in a woodgrain-effect vinyl material it survived several house moves before eventually being relegated to a shed where it continued to be useful for many years. A lot of similar furniture is sold today because it is economical and meets a need. The finishes are superior, the fixing mechanisms more advanced, and the carcase material is denser. In the early days, cupboard doors rarely fitted within the opening but were hung on simple peg hinges to close over the opening in order to cope with any deformation from the perpendicular. Room dividers [straight out of Abigail’s Party] were another early form of flat-pack furniture where the rectangular lower-level boxes, with their drop-down doors held up on flimsy stay-hinges. were the secret of the entire structure’s vertical posture and stability. Regular furniture shops and retailers distanced themselves from such products so they were generally sold by mail order based on dubious projection drawings in black-&-white advertised in the popular magazines. Habitat shook the market up and offered sturdy self-assembly bookcases and dresser units with a visible frame and a clear progression from a box of bits to a finished article. They also managed to crack the baffling instructions problem and ensured that at the end of the exercise you had no shortage or surplus of parts.

Today flat-pack furniture goes to the highest level with some pieces commanding four-figure prices and frequently more expensive than similar fully-assembled furniture made in a factory. I recently made up a sideboard from John Lewis with three drawers and three cupboards under and I was very impressed with the ease of assembly, the clarity of the instructions, the quality of the fittings, and the final appearance. The machining of the panels and fixing holes was extremely precise, and the wood veneers on the drawerfronts and doors lined up and matched across the front of the unit. It was delivered within a few days of ordering in-store and it only took about an hour and a half to put together and start using. At under £400 I thought it was extremely good value; not having Malcolm’s facilities or cabinet making skill I could not have made one myself in a month of Sundays and to buy a fully-assembled equivalent would have cost about twice as much with a three-four week delivery schedule.

My most recent flat-pack project was a large swivelling TV stand that, again, was very well-made and went together perfectly including glass shelves and a heavy veneered outer carcase that immediately became rigid and sturdy before the back panel was fixed. Personally I would recommend people to try their hand at self-assembly and forget the legends of MFI [whose later stuff was not that bad actually]. Obviously, to a certain extent, the quality of material and ease of assembly are in the price but good furniture doesn’t need to cost a fortune and can give years of satisfactory service. The reality is that furniture now comes in containers from far away places like Indonesia and Vietnam and shipping it in flat-pack form saves space and keeps the cost down.