At Rent-a-Dad, we take the trust our clients put in us pretty seriously. Of course we do … we’re your (rental) DAD!! So imagine my surprise when I got the message you see here as I was explaining the ins and outs of understanding IKEA furniture assembly.
Not that I didn’t “get it”. Even with the misspelling this young man was asking a reasonable enough question, and was spending money. Still … well, listen to the story:
We’d received a request for IKEA furniture assembly, and as often happens the request included an estimate for how long the job “should take”. Thing is, as also happens pretty often, it was off … by quite a bit.
That’s OK. Rent-A-Dad, being in the rent-a-DAD business, gets to patiently explain this stuff a lot, So we did, using IKEA’s own estimates … which came to about 4.5 hours to put together a couch, a bed, and a chair.
IKEA’s estimates for assembling their stuff range from spot-on to off by about 100%, with the average being 30-50 percent too low. I explained this, and also gave this person the good news … that in this case IKEA’s estimate was off by only about 25%.
The question he asked above was a pretty good—but also painful—example of how understanding IKEA furniture assembly can go off the rails. The chair was nothing in the scheme of things. And I’d explained that. This was going to be about a 5-hour job, with or without the chair. But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
We never managed to hook up, and I’m not sure whether the sticking point was time, or the cost of the time. But assuming the latter was at least part of the problem (and remember, time is money, right?), let’s examine things a bit.
Understanding IKEA Furniture Assembly
The three pieces we were discussing had cost this young man $1,000. The IKEA couch was $600, the bed and chair $200 each. He’d also spent $500 on an IKEA mattress, which required only unwrapping and placement, but still … $1,500 of IKEA furniture had been purchased.
And he was unhappy being told that taking care of all of it was going to set him back another $250-$300 instead of the $150 he’d hoped this particular adventure in understanding IKEA furniture assembly would run.
We get it. It’s our job to “get it”. But as your Rent-A-Dad it’s also our job to help you understand when maybe you don’t. And here’s something we get to talk about all the time:
The reason IKEA furniture costs what it does is that assembly has been removed from the hard-dollar-cost equation. Understanding IKEA furniture assembly sometimes means that the assembly costs as much as the furniture.
And not in this case. Here, the lesson was that assembly cost 20-30% of the acquisition price rather than the 10-15% this young man had hoped.
The question becomes: where did he get his ideas about IKEA furniture assembly times?
We’ll never know, of course. But we do know that Rent-A-Dad is the best way to get furniture assembled—and when you have them get questions answered.
All you need to do is ask!