It's nine at night. The wardrobe is three-quarters built, there are two screws left over that the manual never mentioned, one door sits about 6mm lower than the other, and the whole thing rocks slightly when you push it. Somebody in the house has stopped talking to somebody else in the house.
I get called to this a lot. Sometimes to finish the job, sometimes to take it apart and start again. And the thing I want to say up front is that it's almost never a skill problem. The people who ring me are perfectly capable of turning a screwdriver. What went wrong was the order they did things in.
Flat-pack instructions tell you the steps. They don't tell you the method. The method is the bit that stops you getting to step 14 and discovering that step 6 was back-to-front.
IKEA only arrived in New Zealand in 2025, but flat-pack has been part of life in the UK for decades and I spent years there building it, dismantling it, and repairing what other people had built. Here's how I approach it.
Build it in the room it's going to live in
This is the mistake that costs the most and it happens before you've opened the box. A built wardrobe does not fit through a standard door. Neither does a six-drawer dresser, most of the time. If you build it in the lounge because the lounge has more space, you will be taking it apart again.
Measure the doorway, the hallway, and any corner it has to turn, then compare that with the assembled dimensions printed on the box. If it's tight, build it where it's going. Clear a working area roughly twice the footprint of the finished piece, because you need room to lay panels out flat and to walk around the thing while it's on its back.
Count everything before you turn a single screw
Open the box, lay every panel out, and tick each one off against the parts list. Then do the hardware. If the list says 47 screws, count 47 screws. It takes ten minutes and it is the single highest-value ten minutes of the whole job.
The reason is simple: a missing part discovered at the start is a phone call. The same missing part discovered at step 19 is a half-built carcass sitting in your bedroom for a week while you wait for the courier. Manufacturers do send short packs. It's not common, but it's common enough that checking is worth it every time.
Sort the hardware into separate containers as you count. Muffin trays, small bowls, egg cartons, jam jars, whatever you have. Cam bolts and confirmat screws look similar at a glance and behave completely differently. Once they're mixed in a pile on the floor you will grab the wrong one, and the wrong one will usually go in far enough that getting it out again damages the board.
Read the whole manual first, then read the panels
Read it end to end before you start. Not step by step as you go. You want to know where this is heading, because a lot of assemblies have a point of no return: a moment where the back goes on, or a drawer runner gets enclosed, and anything you got wrong before that is now sealed inside.
Having built flat-pack before is not the advantage people think it is. Every manufacturer uses slightly different hardware, different panel labelling, and a different assembly order. Assuming you know the pattern is how experienced people make beginner mistakes.
Then look at the panels themselves. Most of them are not symmetrical even when they look it. Pre-drilled holes are often on one face only. Edges are finished on the sides that will be visible and left raw on the sides that won't. Get a panel the right way round but the wrong face up and everything downstream of it is out. Before a panel goes in, find its holes and check its finished edge is pointing where you'll be able to see it.
Learn what the three fittings actually do
Nearly all of it comes down to three things. Dowels are wooden pegs that locate a panel and stop it sliding. They carry no real load, they just line things up. Cam locks are the round metal discs that sit in a face and grab the neck of a cam bolt screwed into the adjoining panel. They do the clamping. Confirmat screws are the big blunt ones that go straight into the edge of a board.
The cam lock is where most jobs go wrong. The disc has an arrow or a slot on it, and that arrow has to be pointing at the hole the bolt comes in through before you assemble the joint. Push the panels together so they're flush and the dowels are fully seated, then turn the cam roughly half a turn until it goes firm. It should not need force. If it does, the bolt isn't in the cam's slot, and forcing it will either strip the cam or crack the board around it.
Chipboard and MDF have no give. When something doesn't fit, the answer is never more pressure. Back it off, work out which panel is proud, and fix that instead.
Snug everything, square it, then tighten
This is the step that separates a piece that lasts fifteen years from one that starts wobbling in six months, and it's the one almost everybody skips.
Do not fully tighten anything until the carcass is completely assembled. Bring every joint up to snug, so the panels are held together but the frame can still flex a fraction. Then check it's square before you commit.
Squaring it is straightforward. Measure diagonally from corner to corner, then measure the other diagonal. If the two measurements are the same, the box is square. If they're not, the frame is a parallelogram and you nudge the long diagonal until the numbers match. A tape measure is all you need. Then, and only then, go round and tighten everything up.
"A frame that gets tightened before it's square stays out of square forever. Every door and drawer you hang on it afterwards will be fighting that error."
On tightening: use hand tools for the final turns. An impact driver in chipboard is a very fast way to strip a cam housing or punch a screw head through a panel, and once that fitting is stripped there is no repair, only a replacement panel. If you're using a drill for speed, set the clutch low and finish by hand. Snug means snug. There is no extra strength available past that point, only damage.
The back panel is structural
That thin sheet of hardboard everybody treats as a dust cover is doing real work. It's what stops the carcass racking, which is the sideways lean you get when a rectangle turns into a parallelogram. Without it, the whole thing is relying on the cam joints alone, and cam joints are poor at resisting racking.
So fit it properly. Every pin or screw the manual asks for, not half of them because it seems like enough. Get it the right way round, since the two faces are rarely identical. And fit it while the carcass is square, because the back is what locks the square in.
If a unit you already own has started leaning, go and look at the back first. Nine times out of ten some of the pins have pulled out, or it was never fully fixed to begin with.
Doors and drawers go on last, and then get adjusted
Hang the doors after the carcass is square, tight, and backed. Not before, whatever order the manual suggests.
Then use the adjustment built into the hinges. European hinges, the cup-shaped ones on nearly every flat-pack door, adjust in three directions: side to side, in and out, and up and down, each on its own screw. Most people never touch them, which is why so many wardrobes have one door sitting lower than its neighbour. Five minutes with a screwdriver evens the gaps up.
Drawer runners are the same. If a drawer catches or sits crooked, the fix is usually a runner that's a couple of millimetres out of level, not a fault in the drawer.
Anchoring it to the wall
Everything above is about making the piece good. This part is about making it safe, and it's the one thing on the job I won't negotiate on.
Tall furniture tips over. It tips when a drawer is pulled out and the centre of gravity moves forward, it tips when a child climbs it, and it tips when the floor isn't quite level. When it goes, it goes fast and it comes down with the weight of everything inside it.
It's overwhelmingly small children, and it's overwhelmingly bedrooms, which is exactly where the tall drawers and the wardrobes live. The usual sequence is a toddler pulling out two drawers to use as a ladder, and the unit coming forward with them.
The good part is that this is about as preventable as household hazards get. The fix is a bracket and a couple of screws, it takes five minutes, and the bracket is usually sitting in the hardware bag already. It's the cheapest component in the whole flat pack and the one most likely to get left behind.
Doing it properly in a New Zealand house
Most interior walls here are timber framing with GIB plasterboard over the top, and studs sit at a maximum of 600mm centres. Hitting a stud is what you want. Find it with a stud detector, or by tapping and then confirming with a small pilot hole somewhere the furniture will hide.
Once you've found it, the screw needs to get properly into the timber. Aim for at least 25 to 30mm of penetration into the stud itself, which through 10mm GIB means a screw of 40mm or more. Anything shorter is gripping plasterboard, and plasterboard has almost no pull-out strength.
If there's genuinely no stud where the bracket needs to sit, use a proper load-rated plasterboard anchor. Not the small plastic plug that came in the bag with the bracket, which is generally sized for a picture hook. Toggle-style or metal self-drilling anchors from Bunnings or Mitre 10 cost a few dollars and hold vastly more. And go easy tightening into plasterboard, because it's soft and it strips.
Two more things that cost nothing. Put the heavy items in the bottom drawers and on the lower shelves, so the piece is bottom-heavy to begin with. And if the floor slopes, pack the front feet rather than the back, so the unit leans very slightly into the wall instead of away from it.
When to call someone
If you've got an afternoon, a clear floor, and the patience to count screws, most flat-pack is well within reach of anyone. That's genuinely true, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to sell a job.
Where it's worth getting someone in is when there's a lot of it at once, when it's a big wardrobe or a wall unit that's awkward to handle on your own, when a previous attempt has gone wrong and something is damaged, or when you want the anchoring done properly and would rather not be drilling into walls yourself. I charge by the hour, so a stack of boxes usually works out better value than people expect. Most single pieces take somewhere between forty minutes and a couple of hours.
Either way, whether you're doing it or I am: count the parts first, square it before you tighten it, and put the bracket on the wall.
Got a pile of boxes waiting?
We're in Auckland to the end of August, then New Plymouth through September. Tell us what's in the boxes and roughly how many, and we'll come back with a time and a rough cost.
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