Furniture

At one time, when you bought furniture, you went to the store, had a look around, saw something you liked and then bought it. It was then loaded into a lorry and delivered intact, placed exactly where you wanted it.

Not now.

Now, you go to the store, look around, find something you like and make a note of the aisle and shelf where it is stored. You then get a huge trolley and manhandle a box (or series of boxes) on to said trolley, push it to the checkout and pay for it, manhandle the bulky items to the car park and then try every possible arrangement of seating in your car in order to fit the boxes in there. Once home, you extricate the boxes from the car, get them into the house and clear a large floor space. You then have to get a series of tools from the garage in order that you might create this amazing table / wardrobe / bookshelf.

This is where men and women discover their differences. Mr Whinge would just take a cursory glance at the instruction booklet, fail to make any sense of it and just plough ahead with the three-dimensional jigsaw (usually ending up with something which would have one panel upside down and have to be dismantled again. I, however, being ever so slightly OCD, would lay all the pieces out and count them to ensure they were all present (and therein lies another story) and correct, then meticulously assemble the item, taking three times longer than Mr. Whinge, getting stuck on the floor because of arthritis, sweating, cursing and sighing in frustration at the pieces that won’t go together ‘properly’.

I think the older I get, the more I realise that flat-pack furniture is not some huge puzzle for adults and ‘fun’. In future, I think I will pay about three times more and have something of higher quality and ready assembled.