Dear LPG, 

The summer is threatening as I am writing this message and that is the time when we ladies do all our spring cleaning and house sorting by tradition.  I think that it has something to do with the need for seeing orderly change in your house but, for me, spring cleaning is not always enough. 

There is something special about seeing a new bit of furniture when you walk into one of your rooms.  It is one of those things that will make a big difference to the way you look at your home even if those who visit will see no change at all unless you give up hinting and ask for their opinion. 

I need to start by mentioning the bedroom of an aunt that I often visited when I was really young.  My brother and I often visited and stayed over and there was nothing particularly odd about it except that she had a curtain draped under what I thought was a shelf. It puzzled me a bit at the time I suppose.

But I digress.  I want to tell a story of my bedroom chest of draws although I hasten to add that I don’t get that many visitors and few of them get to see this facet of my house these days; sometimes it is all about that feeling of knowing that there is a difference rather than the need to broadcast the fact. 

Once upon a time way back in 1976 I and my then young family moved into the house I still live in alone and, back then, there was a lot of ‘making do’ involved in even having a bed to sleep on.  Everything was either borrowed, second hand or the cheapest that we could find and a lot of the furniture items we bought back then have not stood the test of time.  

I am sure that most people who have stayed put for that long will have upgraded a bit too over the years although most of us oldies will also have some really unique pieces that we cannot bear to part with (that means old and tatty bits that the children have been telling us to get rid of for years). 

At the turn of the century it was the turn of my bedroom chest of draws to go.  The chest had been mine for 20 years and, it had been someone else’s for a good while before that!  It was still sturdy, but the then thoroughly modern version of me, decided it was time to move on.    After a lot of searching, I found the perfect replacement at a shop that many people who are of an age to appreciate reading the pages of this website might remember.  I went shopping at MFI and I soon worked out that I was going to need help before my chest of draws would look like the one that I first saw and so admired.

I got a couple of the men in my family to help me with the instructions back then and it looked perfect at first, but it fell apart pretty quickly.  By 2004 it was a shadow of its former self and I gave up.  I went looking again, and I will stress that it had nothing to do with the price (well perhaps a bit).  I found yet another wooden structure that had perfection written all over it to my mind.  But it again came in bits so I had another go;  no male help this time.  After all I had the instructions and all the experiences I had acquired from the previous build.

As you can imagine the walls came tumbling down all too soon. It was not actually the walls, it was the draws but I struggled on with it for quite a while.  The spring of 2016 was the one where I decided that enough was enough and with my new-found knowledge of the internet I did not bother with the shops this time.  

I clicked until I was inspired again and made surprisingly few of them before I was drawn to the textbook replacement on my computer screen.  It was modern, perfect in size for its intended space, beautifully designed but on closer inspection I realised that it was Swedish and, yet again, arrived flat.

This time I also clicked until I found someone who knew what they were doing online and he made it look very simple and did a very professional job.  It did not start to come apart for twice as long as the previous two but I now think I regret getting rid of the original.  

 
There is definitely something to be said for DIY if you are trying to do things on a budget but I have to be doing something wrong somewhere along the line.  I have now put another DIY skill together with the help of my sewing machine and some curtaining.  The result is my broken draws are hidden and my room looks as tidy as it is going to for a while, but my young grandson had a question or two to ask about my curtain in an odd place when he last came to stay. 

They say that a bad workman always blames his tools and, what goes around comes around; but I didn’t think that they had flat packs when my aunt was young… 

NR, Kent.

Just in case you are trying to embark on the nightmare that can be a flat pack assembly journey for the first time, NR has found a few instructions and she also offers a reminder of MFI…

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