Assembly and care

Flat pack furniture fails in predictable ways, and almost all of them are decided in the first hour and the first month. This page is the short version of what to do in both.

Before you start

1. Unpack everything and match it against the parts list before you drive a single screw. A missing fixing found at step nine means the piece spends the night in pieces.
2. Work on carpet or on the flattened carton. A bare floor scratches the finish, and the finish scratches the floor.
3. Read to the end of the instructions once. Ten minutes here saves an hour of reversing a step.
4. Put the piece roughly where it will live before it is heavy. A loaded storage bed is not something two people slide across a room.

The order that matters

1. Start every bolt by hand and leave them all loose until the frame is square. Tightening as you go pulls the frame out of true, and the last panel will not line up.
2. Square it against a corner or with a tape across both diagonals, then tighten in a diagonal pattern rather than round the perimeter.
3. Fit slats, shelves and drawer runners last, and check each one is seated along its whole bearing rather than perched on a lip.
4. Fit the anti-tip hardware before you load anything in. It is the step that gets postponed and then forgotten.

If a bed starts to click

A squeak is two parts moving against each other that should not be. In a bed there are only three candidates, and they are worth working through in this order: tighten every bolt, then push the frame clear of the wall and listen again, then put felt or foam between each slat end and the ledge it rests on. In practice one of the three ends it.

Looking after engineered panel

• Wipe spills rather than letting them stand, and pay attention to seams and cut edges, which is where water gets in.
• Clean with a damp cloth rather than a wet one, and dry after. No soaking, no abrasive pads.
• Use a mat under anything hot. Surface films are hard wearing and they are not heatproof.
• Keep the piece off a floor that is permanently damp, and away from a radiator that runs against its back.

Upholstered headboards and seating

Vacuum with a brush head every few weeks; grit in a weave is what wears fabric rather than sitting on it. Blot a spill rather than rubbing it, work from the outside of the mark inward, and let it dry naturally rather than with heat. On a headboard, the part that gets dirty is the spot where a head rests, so a throw over that area is worth more than any cleaning routine.

Levelling, which takes thirty seconds

A table that rocks is almost never a broken table. It is a floor a couple of millimetres out, and a quarter turn on one adjustable foot fixes it. Do it with a full glass of water on the top so you can see the result rather than guess at it.

Moving it later

Empty drawers and cabinets before moving anything, lift rather than drag, and where a piece has to come apart, keep the hardware in a labelled bag taped to a panel. Panels take one or two disassembly cycles well and get looser after that, because a threaded insert in fibreboard is not a machine thread in steel.

Anything that lives in a room with children should be re-anchored the moment it lands in its new place rather than that evening. The reasoning is in Anchoring, Tip-Over and the Rules Behind Storage Furniture, and the rest of the range is on iPormis.