Building a bed - the beginning

Box 1 of 3 - no instructions

My daughter is growing and she was finding her old bed uncomfortable. So, it was time to go shopping for a new one. After looking at many other stores, we decided to go to IKEA®. We'd been there once before but that was right after the store had opened and it was crowded. We're not crowd people. But after a few years, things had finally slowed down at that location so we tried again. This time, we found he visit enjoyable and there was time and room to look around and think about things. After a while, my daughter found a bed she really liked so we bought one. In case you don't know - what you buy at IKEA is the parts for a bed with instructions on how to put it together. I was elected to put the bed together. The first picture shows one of the three boxes the bed came in. Very neatly packed but where were the instructions?

Ah, the instructions and the many pieces of hardware

I opened all three boxes. I still couldn't find the instructions. Fortunately, the IKEA website (link is to the English version) is very well organized and I was able to find the instructions in PDF format. I downloaded them, printed them and then, and only then, I found the printed instructions in one of the boxes (under one of he large pieces of the bed). I can't tell you if it was the first box I should have opened or not because the boxes are not numbered. At least, I could not see ordinal numbers.

Repackaged hardware components

Anyway, that is one of the few complaints I had. The pieces of the bed were very sturdy and well made. The white finish is resilient and I like the design. It's simple and elegant. The hardware also looked to be of good quality. But there were so many pieces! In the picture here, you can see that I repackaged many of the hardware components to make it easier to keep track of them and to reduce the time I needed to search for the right one. The instructions were good about identifying which parts were needed for each stage of the project.

Construction begins

The instruction were generally very good. Because IKEA sells their merchandise world-wide, they use only pictures in their manuals to save the need to translate written instructions. This makes it fairly easy to understand but also leaves confusing areas - to me, at least. My only other complaint about the whole process was that the large pieces of the bed were not labeled. I've had other furniture kits that put removable idetifying stickers on the large parts. The instructions tried to identify the parts by showing where the pre-drilled holes were and other identifying marks but I found a few of the pieces too similar. The final picture (on the left) shows the first step of putting the bed together but, in a way, I would really call it the second step. I had these parts put together the wrong way the first time because I misinterpreted the drawing. I had to take this apart and put it together correctly which is what is in this picture.

If you click on the final picture, you'll see some of the hardware packages circled in red. I found I needed a lot of room to spread everything out. I did finally get it all together. You'll see that in the next post.