People Being Driven To The Edge By Flat-Pack Furniture

Here at Powertools2U we find that there is nothing more frustrating and rage-inducing than flat-pack furniture building. So, we thought, we can’t be the only people around who find this a chore? As a result, we decided to put a survey together to ask the British public how they felt towards flat-pack furniture building and to see if there’s anyone else out there who’s spent ages building something, only to find out that it doesn’t fit in the intended space!

We split the survey up into three parts to cover three main areas, the actual building process, building with a partner and how you feel while building flat-pack furniture.

First, let’s discuss what people said surrounding how they feel when building flat-pack furniture as there are some quite shocking results that we weren’t expecting to uncover. A whopping 90% of Brits said that they felt some level of frustration while working on their flat pack furniture build. As a result, this has caused 19% of the people to break a component out of sheer anger. And this anger isn’t just causing broken components, amazingly, it’s causing relationships to be broken too.

78% of people who answered our survey admitted that building furniture with a partner caused arguments. So, it’s not surprising to see that over 65% of people then said that they preferred to do flat-pack building alone rather than with a partner. What is surprising though is the next result…

6% of people who answered our survey said they’ve broken up with a partner thanks to building flat-pack furniture, with 20% of those break-ups coming from the 18-24 category. So, who is to blame for the break-ups, the men or the women? Well, according to the results, it’s the men that came out on top, with 66% of them stated that they preferred to do the building alone rather than with a partner.

So, what about the actual building process, how can assembling flat-pack furniture cause all this stress and frustration? Well, for starters it turns out that we’re not really helping ourselves. The first issue is that it appears that we’re not the most obedient bunch in the world, with 39% of Brits admitting to never reading the instructions when assembling flat-pack furniture, with 10% saying that they like to build something completely different out of the components they find in the box. Also, there seems to be quite a lot of abandoned projects too with 15% of people stating that they’ve begun building flat-pack furniture but never actually completed it, the worst of whom are the 18-24s with 1 in 5 holding their hands up to unfinished builds.

The survey results also showed that even when we do manage to complete our builds, we sometimes forget to measure up the space the furniture is destined for. Unbelievably, over quarter of the people who answered our survey (26%) said that they’d built flat-pack furniture but only then to realise it won’t fit in its intended place, and of those people, 60% of the 18-24s said they’d built something that ended up not fitting in its desired spot.

So, is all this stress that comes from building flat-pack furniture worth it?

On a scale from 1-10 over 25% of people said they had 10/10 ultimate satisfaction when they completed flat-pack furniture, with over 75% giving a score of 6 or more out of 10. Only 5% said they felt zero satisfaction, so perhaps this does mean that all the stress is worth it?