Price Guide Flat Pack Assembly

Flat Pack Assembly

Gillis Lundgren, who, exactly 50 years ago, pioneered flat-pack furniture.

As one of the first employees of Ikea, then a fledgling Swedish furniture store, he was attempting to force a large table into the boot of a car for delivery when he had a Road-to-Damascus moment.

After contemplating the problem, Lundgren realised the solution was to completely pull off the legs and place them underneath the table top.

And so was born one of the greatest tests of modern life, a challenge so demanding it can reduce grown men - and women - to tears.

It's a well-known fact among relationship experts that if a couple can survive a weekend of constructing flat pack furniture together, they can survive anything.

It's all to do with the often indecipherable instructions.

They seem to come in 14 languages, including Inuit and Klingon but never English, further illustrated by a bizarre international language of gesticulating stickmen. In fact, last year Ikea was accused of sexism by the Prime Minister of Norway Kjell Magne Bondevik - a bloke, by the way - for showing a man in all of its instruction manuals. In response, Ikea claimed it couldn't use a woman as this might offend customers in the Middle East.

And they weren't joking -able flat pack furniture is seriously big business.

Lundgren's invention saw shipping costs dramatically reduced as each item took up a lot less space. And the time-consuming assembly now became the responsibility of the buyer. The innovation made his boss, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, a fortune.

NOW 80, he's the world's fourth richest man, worth £15billion, with 220 stores in 33 countries.

In this country, firms such as MFI were quick to jump on the flat-pack bandwagon, where it's now a £24billion a year industry.

Soon after founding the firm in 1964, Noel Lister and Donald Searle of Mullard Furniture Industries, started to specialise in flat-pack, selling by mail order.

Then, in 1987, Ikea opened its first British store in Warrington, Cheshire. The flat-pack had arrived - and so had weekends of blue bloody murder when the damned thing wouldn't go together.

Northampton College even introduced a government-funded course on how to erect flat-pack furniture.

Instructor John Tilley's advise to his flummoxed furniture builders is: "Take it out of the box, lay it all out in front of you like bits of a jigsaw, then go away and have a cup of tea.

"People tend to get in a panic simply by opening the box and seeing all the bits tumble out.

"The key is patience. The instructions are not there to fool you. They will work if followed slowly and carefully."

Indeed, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich discovered flat-packs are usually put together incorrectly because the instructions are ignored, misunderstood or lost. Institute head researcher Stavros Antifakos said: "People find them annoying, so they simply don't follow them."

Examining one Ikea wardrobe, they discovered there were 44 ways of putting it together wrongly, only eight of which were actually safe. So now they're developing flat-packs with silicon chips in the various parts to warn if you're making a hash of it.

So flat-packs are here to stay. Last year Ikea even announced it was selling flat-pack homes - they cost £70,000 for first-time buyers who have been priced out of the property market. Just buy a plot of land, open the box and, voila, instant des res...

The secret to flat-pack's success is that it works both for DIYers who know one end of the screwdriver from the other - or for those preferring to get a man in to do it for them.

Over the past decade firms have been springing up to cater for people who regard flat-packs as an invention of the devil.