I showed the following picture to a so-called friend who said, “Oh, you’ve just been assembling a flat-pack! I thought you meant that you’d actually made the things yourself!”
Yes, because I am exactly the sort of chap who would know how to go about cutting and planing virgin timber to make a bed.
Anyone who is so blithely dismissive of the effort involved in building flat-pack furniture has clearly not spent long enough doing it. Though in truth, any time is too long. I would much prefer to have bought a ready-made bunk but could not find one. Which may be just as well, as it would have need disassembling to get it up the stairs and into the bedroom, thereby taking us roughly back to square one.
The instructions did specify that putting the thing together was a two person job. In fact, the only small but critical phase that required any support was lifting the upper bunk on top of the lower one. By an immense stroke of luck two friends proposed calling in for tea yesterday and were able to help me do this. They even brought a top class lemon drizzle cake with them.
We needed the bunk because our sons’ bedroom is too small for two full size single beds, and they have outgrown their cot beds. We do have another bedroom already equipped with two full size single beds, but it is downstairs, right next to the sitting room, and we assessed that there would be zero chance of their actually going to sleep there until we went to bed ourselves.
Now everyone warns me that we have set ourselves up for a nightly battle over who is going to sleep in the top bunk. The manufacturer’s instructions specify that the top bunk must never be occupied by a child under the age of six. My four-year-old thinks he has agreed a rota with his seven-year-old brother. So it is Elfin Safety versus Democracy. I wonder which of those will come out on top?
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