DoDD: The Desk

Originally published on Nov 6, 2019

I’m still organizing. Don’t judge me or this mess of an office space.

TL;DR

It’s dead. 🙄
I love the desk…but putting it together was borderline disrespectful.

Quick Intro

I do a good amount of work from home, so having an office space that I could [comfortably] be in for hours at a time is a necessity for me. I’ve tried to survive without all the “fixins” in the past (e.g., a proper desk, computer chair, additional monitor) and I quickly began to pay the price for that 😣.

I’ve been in desperate need of a new desk and the day had finally come — it arrived! As a person who thoroughly enjoys working with their hands, I’m usually super excited when I get new furniture that I need to assemble and this time was no different.

Assembly went smoothly…up until the very last two steps. We almost made it, y'all. 😩

My Goal

Putting this desk together without having to start over or fuss out some customer service rep because of missing parts/tools was bare minimum. Thankfully, the assembly instructions were clear enough for me not to feel like hurling the entire thing out the window. Great start.

My Experience

Pictured above, we have our friend, the Allen wrench (Al, for short) along with its screws. It’s commonly utilized for furniture assembly, so I was fully prepared to use the shit out of it — and that, I did. The screws in this picture are the ones that needed to be used in the second-to-last step which I just refused to include. Allow me to show you why:

In that step, the screws needed to be inserted at different places underneath the desk (as shown by the arrows in the picture). Sounds easy enough…except it wasn’t 😑.

Al was severely underperforming here and not because it wasn’t functioning correctly…it’s just hard as fuck to use an Allen wrench upside down to screw in a SHORT screw. The 15 minutes of frustration, cursing, struggling and sweating here alone was enough to make me question the motives of whoever authored the instructions. (To clarify, 15 minutes passed before I was able to fully insert one screw). I got through most of them…the last two weren’t worth it. This was a true “Yo…WTF?” moment if there ever was one.

After saying screw them screws (I know, I know…but I had to 😬), I got to the very last step. All I needed to do was screw in 4 additional screws (upside down again) but this time, they were different — just regular screws, so not too bad. The tools came with a screwdriver that I hadn’t used yet and I figured now was the time. Cool.

The screwdriver didn’t fit. That’s it…that’s the tweet.

Luckily, as every self-proclaimed semi-expert furniture assembler knows…when the screwdriver ain’t shit, there’s always the scissors. They have yet to fail me.

“Yeah, they had us in the first half, not gonna lie…” Scissors came through in the clutch.

Dope or Dead?

This is dead.

If I ever need to purchase or reassemble this particular desk again for whatever reason, I’ll be making sure that I complete the second-to-last step (i.e., using Al upside down to insert the short screws) a bit earlier in the process. That way, I’ll be able to attach the black plank while the desk frame is upside down and avoid having to attach it from underneath when desk frame right-side up. Granted, it may be challenging to flip the desk right-side up after the black plank is attached (which I can see being the motivation for attaching it closer to the end); however, this experience was so arduous and time consuming for me that I’d be willing to give it a try.

I’ll also be keeping the scissors on deck.