DIY Disaster
In my first flat bought a bunch of IKEA furniture. Mistake.

Despite having engineering genes going back as far as great-grandparents I'm useless with screwdrivers and tend to consider Stanley knives to exist solely for the purposes of cutting myself (by accident, rather than on purpose - am a mentalist, but not that bad).

Accordingly, thinketh a young Edmund, I'll have a shmoke and a couple of beers THEN I'll build 'em.

Yeah.

The chest of drawers despite a hypermanic building phase collapsed in a heap that I considered hilarious when I put something in them.

The wardrobe I ended up batoning (is that the word?) to the wall to give it some structural stability.

For many months afterwards my drawer clothes were in the wardrobe.

Not my finest hour.
(Eds Meds Mathskillz=1,Socialskillz=0, Tue 8 Apr 2008, 19:30, 1 reply)

Furniture from beyond the grave
I was assembling an IKEA cupboard. It was on its side, and I had the base, the top and both sides in place. I decided to rotate it to an upright position before putting the back on it.

...

Bleddy thing collapsed, with huge chunks torn from the chipboard where the bolts had been. I nearly burst into tears at the utter waste of time and money - the thing was completely beyond recovery. ... Or was it?

Fortified by strong Belgian beer, I realised that if I turned the side-pieces upside down, I'd be able to make use of some undamaged holes drilled into the structure. So, armed with this realisation, I went about reassembling the thing - this time in an apparently incorrect manner.

The cupboard is still standing, and you'd only know it was an IKEA zombie resurrected from the dead, if you looked in some very particular places. Otherwise, it's absolutely fine!
(Happy Idiot Talk now has an alibi for, Tue 8 Apr 2008, 23:22, closed)