[wongarsu]

I have yet to experience (in person) anybody expressing frustration about putting together IKEA furniture. The closest thing are some friends who have expressed bewilderment at "the internet's" view that IKEA furniture might be difficult to assemble.

[thirdsun]

That's my experience as well.

IKEA furniture is pretty much designed to be assembled by anyone. And that makes me wonder whether the "IKEA" effect as described in the original link even applies. I agree with the general observation - understandably people value things they created, things that took effort. While this applies to that old coffee table you restaurated carefully, I really doubt this is true for the cheap IKEA console you're pretty much expected to assemble without problems.

[weaksauce]

IKEA furniture is not "hard" to assemble per say. It's annoying and frustrating because the qc on hole alignment and how well they tap the holes is lacking. Coupled with cheap veneered particle board lowering the overall build quality.

I am pretty handy and have a ton of nice tools and have worked with my hands building things for a living for about 6 years or so and a software developer otherwise.

I actually just had to "fix" a crappy ikea chest of drawers because the particle board popped out of the dado in the rear piece so the drawer would rub on the next drawer down. Some cheap brackets were installed as a temp fix but a real fix would be to install a better bottom board that flexes less and to glue it in place rigidly.

[Springtime]

Agreed about the build quality. Something to consider about assembly is also the circumstances of the installation. Was talking with a person recently who together with an engineer assembled one of the Pax systems with the large sliding rail doors in a space that had literally about a half an inch gap between the top and the ceiling. Because of this it ended up mostly being assembled upright, not to mention the task of affixing the upper clips in the narrow space at the top to hold the slider for the rather hefty dual doors. So at times there can more factors involved with the frustration than something like the instructions themselves.

[Moru]

I usually put an angle bracket (?) at the back of the drawer where it usually gets loose. Screw it in with bolts from back and bottom to keep them together.

[vosper]

I've never been really frustrated, but I was amazed how long it took me to assemble a big sectional couch. I had watched a timelapse of someone else doing it and thought there was no way it would take me 4 hours. It did.

But the couch was awesome and totally worth the effort. I'd do it all again :)

[bjelkeman-again]

I assembled a clothes cupboard with sliding doors. Consisted of hundreds of pieces. I normally have no issues with Ikea stuff, but gee what a pain this one was. It took four-five hours. Have since discouraged multiple people from buying it by just describing the process.

[ivanhoe]

well, honestly, assembling prefabricated furniture parts is not really my idea of a productive or fun use of my time. It's easy to do, but can take a lot of time for bigger pieces, and doing it makes you painfully aware that the quality of the product is not that great (to put it nicely). Unlike building something yourself, you have zero control of the process or the outcome, it's really just about saving some money at the cost of your time. Maybe frustration is a hard word for that, but to me it's not enjoyable activity at all. And I otherwise love woodworking and manual labour, so it's not just me being lazy.