Tonight we hoped to finish the girl’s room. It has been repainted, had the carpet replaced with laminate flooring, and a new desk, wardrobe and chest of drawers installed and today the last bits of flat-pack nastiness were delivered – the bed and over-the-bed unit.

I still can’t beleive how much stuff came out of such a tiny room. Half of it is still all over the stairs and the boys’ room, so Jayne & I were dead keen to finish it all off (apart from putting her shelves back in a different place. That can wait until the weekend) so the rest of the house can look less like the aftermath of the exploding house scene in Zabriskie Point. (Pretentious? Moi?)

So it was no surprise that we fell victim to the curse of the flat-pack.

The storage unit was bad enough. The instructions were a bit suspect as they referred to both side panels as the right-hand side, but then (as always) the penultimate step led to the revelation that I had used the wrong screws for something on step 1 and had to make frantic changes.

The real blow was the bed. It turned out that one of the major structural parts was manufactured wrongly. A couple of bits of wood which are fixed to the main bit of wood with heavy-duty staples are in the wrong place so we cannot even assemble the frame.

Tomorrow we will call the customer care number to see how much they care, and how quickly they can ship a replacement part. We are hoping it will be before the weekend. In the meantime Chrystal will have to continue crashing on a matress on the floor.