6 Best Tips for Assembling Furniture Quickly

Here are some best practices to work efficiently while assembling your newly bought furniture.

Tip 1: Find a space large enough relative to the item you are assembling.

First of all, before breaking open any boxes, make sure you are working with plenty of room. This goes without saying – the larger the piece of furniture like a bed, for example, the more space you will need to spread the components out. You will be amazed at how well the manufacturer packs the shipping boxes. Once you start pulling out the contents of each box your assembly area can quickly become cluttered.

Tip 2: After opening all boxes, first locate the instructions and the hardware.

Next, using a box cutter or utility knife, carefully run the blade along the taped seams of the box to unveil the contents. I like to locate the instructions and the hardware before pulling out the contents of the box.

Tip 3: Organize all hardware and cross-reference the listed quantities with what the bag actually contains.

Thirdly, unfold the instructions and scan them over getting a general sense of how the pieces come together. See the required tools section to make sure you have all that you need. From there, find the illustrations and quantities of the hardware. Tear open the hardware bag and go to town organizing all the pieces – matching pairs of screws, nuts, and bolts and ensuring all quantities listed are what the bag actually contains. I like to organize the hardware on a scrap piece of cardboard or packing foam to keep everything in one spot.

This step is critical because it ensures your organization throughout the assembly and it also ensures that you have enough hardware to complete the assembly. If it happens that the manufacturer mistakenly didn’t provide enough hardware it is during this step where you can decide to contact them and have them ship the necessary hardware. For a quicker solution, if you have a box of miscellaneous nuts and bolts lying around I’d recommend to dig through it and find something that will work! You could also run to the hardware store.

Tip 4: Organize all furniture pieces and remove the packaging/boxes from the assembly area.

Once all the hardware is organized and accounted for, begin pulling out the furniture pieces from the box and organizing those the same way as the hardware. Group similar pieces and try to remove the packaging from the assembly area or keep it neatly out of the way.

Tip 5: Begin assembling the pieces.

At this point, you know where all the pieces are, you have a sense of how the pieces go together, all the necessary tools, and the work area is decluttered. You can now start assembling. You’ll find that the process goes much smoother and faster because you have done this prework.

Tip 6 (Pro Tip): Assemble stages of like components all at once.

As you assemble different components try to be mindful of components that are assembled in the same way. For example, if you have to assemble four drawers assemble the first stage of the drawer for all four drawers. The first stage may be to screw the left and right sides of the drawers. Do this on drawers 1-4 then slide in the bottom on drawers 1-4, etc. In this way, you are acting like an efficient assembly line.

I hope you find these tips helpful. Let me know by leaving a comment below and feel free to share any tips that work for you!

– Matt

That’s Fixable LLC