Today I visited a customer who needed some help to assemble a tall IKEA Pax wardrobe with sliding doors in Totterdown, Bristol. I had been told that one of the sliding doors had been assembled but the rest needed to be built. No problem I thought.
I arrived on time and promptly headed upstairs where I found that one of the doors had been assembled. All the pieces of the wardrobe had been unpacked and were leant against one of the walls. There wasn't much space in the bedroom which meant I would have to assemble the IKEA Pax frames upright, but that's no problem. The customer had told me that a man from a different company had attempted to assemble the wardrobe a few days earlier but had said they needed to leave and they would come back with a colleague to help them. He left and never returned.
I began to check through all the items to find that some of the panels were damaged. I immediately showed this to my customer who was unaware of this. I explained that the cam screws had been pulled out of one of the frames both at the top and the bottom, creating unusable panels (See Pictures). She later told me that her son had heard a "crash" not long before the previous assembler (I use the world assembler very loosely) left. He had obviously broken one of the frames of the wardrobe and left without telling the customer.
The wardrobe comes with two frames so I built the other frame which hadn't been damaged and assembled the internal parts so that half of the wardrobe could be used for the time being (See Pictures). Unfortunately the customer now has to buy a new Pax frame and wait for delivery before I can finish assembling their new wardrobe.
Please be aware of which trades people you use. Check reviews, ask questions about what experience they have and if the price seems too good to be true then maybe they don't have the correct knowledge or experience of the item which you need them to build.