Furniture & Flat-Pack Assembly

Anchoring, which is the part that matters

Tall furniture tipping onto children is a real and regular cause of serious injury in Australia, and almost every flat-pack unit ships with an anchor strap in the bag that never gets used. Product Safety Australia has run campaigns on it for years.

Anchoring properly means finding an actual stud rather than screwing into plasterboard and hoping. Plasterboard on its own holds almost nothing under a sideways load, which is exactly the load a climbing toddler applies. Where there's no stud in the right spot, the fix is a proper cavity anchor rated for it, or a batten across two studs.

On brick and masonry it's a different fixing again, and the wrong plug in a hollow block is as good as no fixing at all.

We anchor as standard. If you'd rather we didn't because you're renting and worried about wall damage, tell us — but we'll usually be able to do it in a way that patches back to nothing.

What we assemble

• Bedroom — wardrobes, robe internals, bed frames, bunks, drawers, bedside units
• Living and study — bookcases, TV units, desks, office chairs, shelving systems
• Kitchen and dining — dining settings, bar stools, buffets, pantry units
• Outdoor — garden sheds, outdoor lounges and dining settings, pergolas and gazebos, kids' cubbies, swing sets and trampolines
• Garage and storage — heavy-duty shelving, workbenches, tool chests
• Gym — treadmills, weight racks, cable machines, exercise bikes; the heavy ones that arrive on a pallet and take two people
• Styling pieces for a listing, assembled on site and disassembled afterwards if that's what's needed

Sheds specifically

A garden shed is the flat-pack job people most often start and abandon. The instructions assume a flat base, two people and a still day, and one of those three is usually missing.

The base is the whole job. A shed built on uneven ground doesn't square up, the doors won't line up, and the roof sheets don't meet at the ridge. We'll level and prepare the base or work off a slab you've already got, and if the ground needs work first we'll tell you before we're standing there with the panels out of the box.

We also anchor it down. An unanchored shed in a westerly is a large sheet-metal kite, and there's at least one every summer around here.

Moving house

Most flat-pack furniture isn't designed to be taken apart and put back together — the cam fittings and particleboard don't hold as well the second time. Some pieces survive it fine, some don't.

We'll tell you which of yours is which before you pay to move it. Occasionally the honest advice is that a five-year-old flat-pack wardrobe isn't worth the labour to disassemble, transport and rebuild, and that money is better spent on a new one. We'd rather say that than charge you for the exercise.

Where it is worth moving, we bag and label the hardware for each piece, which is the difference between a smooth rebuild and an afternoon of guessing.