Remember those old Hygena QA ads where a precocious little girl shows her half-witted parents how to assemble a flat-pack kitchen? 

With our UK trip now forgotten and Christmas a little over two weeks away, John and I have finally started installing our new kitchen units. Hurrah! Frankly we have, between us, put so much Ikea furniture together that we really ought to be able to do it blindfold.  So I am still at a loss to explain how John had to take my 40cm floor unit to bits three times before I finally managed to assemble it the right way up.  It cost me dinner out!

Eventually all the units were ready so we stacked them in the opposite corner from where the first wall unit was due to be located.  It didn’t seem to either of us a particular problem that we were blocking the door to the rear hall and entrance and main staircase.  After all, we usually use the front entrance and we have a secondary staircase leading directly from the kitchen to the first floor.  It was only when the double-glazing salesman called that we realised how ludicrous it was to have to go up to the first floor to answer the rear doorbell. 

First to go up was the corner wall unit.  One side of the unit attaches to a tiled outside wall, the other to a newly dry-lined interior wall.  To give extra support and rigidity to the plasterboard, John had put up an additional horizontal brace at the point where the cupboard fixings would go.  It was only when the ‘cheville’ screw did not want to bite, that he remembered that we had made exactly the same mistake with our second-floor kitchen.  These brass fixings are made specifically for certain thicknesses of plasterboard. Add a couple of millimetres of metal rail and you are sunk.  The best we could do now was to move the fixing brackets and drill new holes in all the wall units … as we had done before.

 We had bought an angled bookshelf as a finishing touch to the row of cupboards. Because it is constructed from solid MDF and sprayed to match the cupboard doors, it does not come with ugly metal fixing brackets.  Instead, one is supposed to drill a couple of neat screw holes at the top to fix to the wall, and then stablise by screwing into the last wall unit.  Easy.  Until you find that you have drilled two neat holes at exactly the same level of the original wall unit brackets. SO THE SCREWS WONT BITE! 

We should finish locating the floor units tomorrow, once I have finished tiling the wall behind the tall oven unit.  Unfortunately, we only decided to tile this wall after we had bought the tiles for the adjacent wall.  Although we were able to find the same tiles on sale a week later, they were from a different batch.  We are wondering whether anyone will notice the difference in colour …