Well, lookie here. it’s a piece of Wayfair furniture with a screw in the wrong place. It is in the wrong place, isn’t it?
Nope. Wayfair furniture screw placement, like screw location in a lot of flat-pack, assemble-it-yourself furniture, isn’t always what it seems. And Rent-a-Dad knows—and is gonna teach you a bit about screw placement.
Rent-a-Dad’s most recent rant was about the difference between buying furniture from Wayfair and from Amazon. This isn’t that; pretty much all assemble-your-own furniture has multiple holes like the ones you see in the drawer slide here. And selecting which holes to use in Wayfair furniture screw placement—or in pretty much any furniture assembly task—isn’t always completely straightforward. There are physics concerns, to be sure, but in most cases selecting any of the four holes you see here won’t have a serious impact on that issue. At least not space-wise.
Wayfair Furniture Screw Placement
The issue in this case is that when the drawer slide was lined up against that not-terribly-high-quality manufactured wood there was what looked like a starter hole, just waiting to have a screw put in it. And starter holes are great; not only do they direct you where things go, but they reduce the damage you might do if you tried to drive a screw into a piece without the guidance a starter hole provides. Hooray! Hit that hole, baby!
But not this time.
In this case, that hole you see is where it is entirely by coincidence. Multiple holes where you can choose to drive a screw into? It’s pretty much always a sign that both the hardware and the surface it attaches to are designed to work in multiple ways with multiple matched parts.
In fact, this particular piece is odd. Dad’s seen a lot of pre-fab furniture, and generally the edge of a drawer side doesn’t have starter holes. Why? Because the act of driving something into that kind of surface tears the surface up, that’s why.
It’s sort of common sense, actually. See the screw that’s holding things together? Think for just a second and you’ll realize that the pre-drilled hole is way too wide to handle that tiny little screw. If you used that hole the slide wouldn’t affix to the drawer. It would just wiggle around!
It’s a great illustration of why you’re often better off hiring a professional to do your furniture assembly. But when that’s not an option, at least you have Rent-a-Dad!