Cats....always watching and secretly mocking your efforts.
I’d like to know exactly why it is that as soon as there is anything that comes with the instructions “some assembly required”, I always tend to think it can’t be too difficult. After all, if it was too difficult to do, then they would sell it whole – or at least warn you that it’s a pain in the butt to do it yourself. Personally I think anything from Ikea should come with that warning but that’s another story. The last couple of days I was thinking of how nice it would be to have a couple of bikes that we could take riding out along the bay, or up at Daisy Hill or even when we went away for short breaks up or down the coast.
I already had a mountain bike from my teenage years, still not in bad nick but there is one thing terribly wrong with it (sorry Mum, for she bought it for me). It is the most ghastly shade of pink you’ve ever seen (again, sorry Mum). If you can think of that fluoro pink mixed with fluoro high visibility vest type orange, that is the kind of pink that it is. In retrospect, I’m guessing that’s why we ended up getting the horrid pink/orange – ghastly, but at least I’d be easily seen on my treks to and from school. I figured my sister doesn’t have a bike, nor is she completely turned off by the revolting pinkness of my old one, I would kindly donate it to her.
So off on a 5hr quest we went to find two bikes for the both of us that wouldn’t break the bank. After visiting the first bike store, the prices almost gave me chest pain. Their “budget” bike for recreational riding was somewhere in the realm of $800. Granted, they were very pretty and they had disc brakes instead of the standard ones on a cheaper bike but OMG, I could buy two flash sticks for that price. Or another lens! And then the standard price comparison – OMG that’s a bit over half my fortnightly pay! For just one!
Then I remembered seeing bikes in a Big W catalogue, so we hit Target because it was the nearest department store. Their selection was dismal so off to Big W we went, ending up somewhere in Capalaba where I found my pretty blue bike – only they didn’t have any in stock to sell. BUT having found my 2 wheeler beast, I was not going to be deterred by such a simple thing as “no stock available”. A few hours later, we ended up at the Big W closest to home and got my blue bike there as well as a silver one for my other half – all for half the price of what we were looking at for one gotten from a specialty store.
There was just one catch – they were only 90% assembled and you do the rest of it yourself when you get home. Now I figured this can’t possibly be too hard. I mean, thousands of mums and dads do this at Christmas time every year in the few hours before Christmas Day itself. Surely if it couldn’t be done very quickly or easily, they wouldn’t do it. Big W does offer a bike assembly service for $16 or so per bike but the cheapskate in me insisted that such a small job wasn’t worth that much.
Let’s just say, if you have a bad track record with Ikea products, then just pay the $16 for pre-assembly and be done with it. It’s not as big a headache as putting a book case or a filing cabinet together but it’s still one hell of a pain in the rear. 
