Ikea woes…I just bought a Tomnas bookshelf from Ikea, and the pieces don’t fit together. I have several other shelves and other things from Ikea, and I’ve run into a few problems putting them together, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a little creative problem solving. But this is something totally different. I’m stuck, and I don’t know how to fix it.
So trying to make a long story short, I’m at the step where the sides need to be attached to the middle and bottom. One side has metal bits and the other side has wooden pegs. These are both supposed to fit neatly into the holes on the other side, but they will not go in. One one side the metal pegs fit, but then the wooden pegs don’t line up right (and they’re not off by much–maybe 1/4 inch at the most). On the other side, all of the metal pegs don’t even line up right. Is there anything I can do? Is it me, or is this thing defective? Am I going to have to drive two hours to take this back to Ikea? I hate to be defeated by a crappy piece of flatpack furniture, but that’s where I am right now. I’ll probably never buy anything from Ikea again. :mad: If anyone has any ideas, please share! I’m desperate. And I need a place to put my books.
My experience with Ikean furniture turning into an Escher print is that I need to go back to step 1 (not necessarily taking it all apart again, because it can be kind of unforgiving that way), but just visually confirm that I really did get every single part in place facing the way that it’s supposed to be. The drawings can be pretty subtle about which way they’re supposed to connect, and you often don’t find out you’ve got a couple pieces backwards until several steps later.
Thirded. In my experience - and over the years I have built up an impressive collection of Ikea Allen keys - Ikea furniture always comes with all the requisite screws, dowels, etc, and it always fits together as described in the assembly instructions. The thing is that parts which might look perfectly symmetrical are often not, and it crucially matters that you don’t invert left and right, or top and bottom, at the wrong stage of the assembly process. At each step you need to check that the size and location of the holes, angles, etc matches exactly what is shown in the illustration, and this goes not just for the particular holes, etc, that you will be employing in this step but for all of them.
Yeah, you sort of *must *be doing something wrong. ‘Missing parts’ is an uncommon problem, ‘instructions are bizarre and obscure’ is more common, but ‘product is incapable of being assembled right’ is rare as rocking horse shit.
As UDS (well, everyone) said, you’ve probably got a non-symmetrical part the wrong way around, or you’ve maybe put the wrong fixings in a place where they sort-of-work, but this has left you with a knock-on problem further along.
Agreed with the above. I’ve built a lot of IKEA furniture and I’ve consistently found that while the quality of materials used varies a lot in order to have a range of price points, the actual design and construction quality is top notch. If something is wrong it is highly likely user error.
This is the problem.
Whenever I play Ikea, I’ve learned the most important rule of the game is : Don’t start working by following the instructions one step at a time.
Start working by first reading the instructions through to the final step.
Then, lay out all the pieces on the floor in front of you, grouped according to each step.
Then place the screws for that step alongside the pieces.
Then-STOP.
Go back to each group of pieces where they lay on the floor, and check the tiny details in the diagram.Move the pieces to lay in exactly the same orientation as the the details. Turn each piece over and notice that it is not exactly symmetrical…Look at the tiny little bumps and ridges at the corners–do they face upwards or downwards in the diagram? Look at the holes for the screws…and notice that on one end of the shelf, the holes are very close to the corners, but at the other end, the holes are an inch farther away from the corners. Rotate the shelf where it lays on the floor, so that it lays in the same angle as drawn in the diagram.
You need some glue, a hammer and nails, a circular saw, several clamps, a drill (drill driver will do), a propane torch, a belt sander, bandsaw, several chisels, an adze, and then a shovel to dig a hole to bury all the parts after it still won’t go together.
Or just start over because you didn’t get something right.
This is EXCELLENT advice (that I don’t follow but should). It is absolutely imperative that you examine the larger wooden pieces minutely to make sure you’re not putting them on upside down or backwards. That will fuck you every time.
Cite: assembled entire kitchen full of Ikea cabinets absolutely alone because my ex is a sack of shit. (Did you know the cabinet screws aren’t Phillips head? Nope. They’re Posidriv. Did you know that if you don’t know that you will strip the SHIT out of some screws? Could have just bought their silly little assembly kit but dumb me assumed I knew what a screwdriver was and how to work one.)
(I’m looking at the assembly PDF.) So you’re at step 21 of the instructions, if I understand correctly.
The hole spacing of the bottom shelf seems to be a little bit asymmetrical; I think yours may be assembled backwards. In step 12, did you have to drill new holes or were you able to use the existing ones?
Thanks everyone! (Especially TriPolar–I was wondering what to do with a pile of useless wood, and burying it at midnight in a deserted graveyard seems like a good solution)
Thanks for the tip on the screws! It looks like that’s what these screws are, and I’ve been using a regular screwdriver. :smack: They do go in, but it’s a lot harder to get them back out.
This is correct. The bottom shelf is okay, but the side panels aren’t exactly the same. I thought they were identical, but I looked at them very closely, and there are two matching rows of holes, and one row of holes is 1/4 inch closer to the side. Those two panels are mirror images, and there’s nothing at all in the instructions that shows that. They look exactly the same, and the parts aren’t numbered or marked, so there’s no way to tell which is which, except to put them on and see if it all fits together (and of course it never does the first time). Thanks, Ikea! I switched those two panels, and I think I have something on backwards on the bottom, but it looks like that might take care of it.
There’s a larger version of this shelf that I would like to have, but I don’t think I want to go through this again. But I have a $20 Ikea coupon…
I suppose they didn’t have enough room to include all the necessary information because the instruction booklet is now about half filled up with demands to anchor your shelves to the wall in about a zillion different languages.
I hate those mirror-image pieces. The good news is that once you make this mistake, you will never make it again. You are almost Ikea-proof from here on out. I feel guilty for confessing this, but I have never anchored anything to the wall like I was supposed to. I have also never had anything fall over, so I’m probably due by now.
On a small note of pride, I once put together an entire Tarva bedroom set (big dresser, little dresser, little tall dresser, and two nightstands) and only cried once.
