I recently moved to a new apartment and had to buy a whole bunch of furniture, including a bed frame, bookshelf, dresser, and couch. I had to do the move in a bit of a hurry, so I did one rapid fire furniture shopping session at Ikea, taking advantage of their shipping policy: $59 for delivery within 30 miles regardless of how many items you bought and same-day delivery if you order by 2pm.
I had this grand vision of ordering furniture Friday morning and relaxing in it Friday night. Not being a seasoned furniture shopper, I forgot one very important detail: all Ikea furniture requires assembly. And lots of it.
![Ikea](/assets/img/blog/ikea/ikea.jpg)
It’s not exactly hard, but it takes a lot of time and requires you to have the patience to read and understand Ikea’s *word-less *manuals. That’s right, the instructions don’t include a single word: they are entirely composed of images and symbols, presumably to save on translation costs.
![A typical page of Ikea instructions](/assets/img/blog/ikea/instructions.jpg)
Taking a page from the lego instruction manuals, the folks at Ikea generally do a pretty good job of visually conveying each step. Having said that, the graphics—especially the “best practices” images at the beginning of each instruction pamphlet—can be fairly amusing.
![The "best practices" section on the first page of each instruction pamphlet](/assets/img/blog/ikea/get-help.jpg)
And occasionally, some of the images are downright incomprehensible. So, for those of you who’ve spent some quality time with “Billy”, “Ektorp”, and a hex wrench, here is some entertainment:
![Ikea lightsaber](/assets/img/blog/ikea/IKEA_LIGHTSABER.jpeg)
![Ikea couple](/assets/img/blog/ikea/give-up.png)
![Ikea Forsby](/assets/img/blog/ikea/forsby.jpg)
![Ikea explosives](/assets/img/blog/ikea/explosives.jpg)
![Ikea Henj](/assets/img/blog/ikea/henj.jpg)
Bryan Covell
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like my books, Hello, Startup and Terraform: Up & Running. If you need help with DevOps or infrastructure, reach out to me at Gruntwork.