Don't Let DIY Do You In

It seems so simple in the beginning. You discover the perfect desk/table/bureau at a great price in a catalogue/on the Web/at a mammoth box store. The color, style and size are exactly what you have been searching for, and for less than you expected to pay. It can be yours in a flash, either by express shipment or in the back of your car. So you buy it, feeling pretty good about your shopping skills. Until you open the box.

Before you lies a pile of 50 pieces of wood and/or fiberboard, 80 wood pegs and 120 odd connectors that resemble nothing you've ever seen. A single sheet of instructions with a few barely decipherable pictograms explains the process of assembling your new collection of furniture parts.

Welcome to the world of ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture, sometimes referred to as knocked-down or flat-packed furniture. Did you, perchance, overlook the microscopic "some assembly required" notice posted at the bottom of the catalogue blurb?

Don't despair. You're not alone. For better or worse, RTA is a popular way to get stylish, inexpensive furnishings into your home quicker and cheaper than from standard furniture sources. The good news is that RTA furniture is usually worth the minor exercise in frustration that comes with putting it together. Assembly is seldom as difficult as it first seems and rarely takes more than an hour. When you're done, you'll have a chic new piece of furniture to enjoy for years to come and a pile of saved money to spend on the rest of your furnishing scheme.

Best of all, if you are confounded by the prospect of doing it all yourself, you can usually find a service that will come to your home for a fee and assemble the furniture. Since they do this all the time, they can do it quickly and at surprisingly low cost. Ask the furniture retailer for leads. They often have a couple of names to suggest. After all, they've seen your kind before.

If you choose to proceed on your own, the following step-by-step survival guide will make your task simpler and more fulfilling.

1. Count everything that comes out of the box. Check your count against any inventory list that is included with the instructions. Don't worry if there are one or two extra pieces of hardware. This sometimes happens as a hedge against lost pieces. Do worry if there are one or two pieces too few.

2. Before you do anything else, sit down and calmly read through the instructions from beginning to end. Do it more than once if they don't seem clear the first time. Try to understand the sequence in which things need to happen and what each intermediate step is supposed to look like.

3. Figure out which fasteners go into which holes on which pieces of wood, and begin sorting them accordingly.

4. Assemble all of the tools you think you might need. If the instructions call for a hammer to tap pieces together, use a rubber mallet to minimize dings and nicks. A battery-powered drill/screwdriver will also greatly simplify your work and eliminate the peril of having a cord dragging through your newly sorted array of parts.

5. Find a soft, flat surface to work on, preferably a rug, carpet or old blanket, to prevent scratches and dents. Keep all metal pieces that might mar surfaces safely to one side.

6. As you begin fitting the pieces together, proceed slowly and carefully. Don't force anything. If you're getting too much resistance, you may be doing something wrong. Double-check the instructions before breaking something or stripping a connector. If you never plan to disassemble the piece, adding carpenter's glue to each wood-to-wood connection will extend its useful life.

7. Once you are finished, put everything away. Hide the box and tell everyone that it was a cinch. But when they suggest that you help them with their own RTA project, recite this list and tell them you don't have time.