It looked great in the showroom.
But now you have to assemble it at home.
For many people, there’s a certain, shall we say, "challenge" to buying furniture from IKEA.
“It’s difficult but it’s affordable. So that’s the trade-off, right?” sums up Trina Rytwinski as she prepared to take home a van-load of furniture from the IKEA in Ottawa.
How hard can it be? Staff at M.I.T. actually programmed robots to assemble the stuff.
But if that’s a bit out of your price range, you can call The Assembler.
“You call me up. I come into your house, unpackage your IKEA furniture from the box, and put it together quickly and easily,” says Jim McArthur,A.K.A. The Assembler.
McArthur is a former radiation lab worker with Health Canada. He’s also a handyman with, he says, a unique knack for putting together assemble-it-yourself furniture.
“A lot of people have great difficulty putting these things together and I discovered I had a knack for interpreting the instructions and getting it done just like that,” he says.
IKEA offers its own assembly service. According to its website the cost starts at $79. The Assembler will do it for $15 an hour with a 2 hour minimum.
Back at IKEA, Trina Rytwinski says she’s going to build all her furniture herself. But… “Come to my house around 4:30 tomorrow and we’ll see if I have a different tune.”
