Don't judge a DIY kit by its packaging

Some times things are not what they seem. "What is so difficult about assembling a shoe cabinet," I thought as I and dear wife were looking at the mock-up model of a DIY shoe cabinet kit on display at the supermarket. For RM30.00 it was affordable and any way we needed to replace the current shoe cabinet that has broken down due to old age and long use.

According to the picture of the cabinet in the packaging it is just a one-compartment rectangular box with a double-leaf louvered door. The parts that make up the kit consist of 10 pieces of pre-fabricated rectangular fibre boards with some ironmongery accessories and screws for fixing. The manual that comes with the kit is just 1 sheet of paper with plenty of illustrations and instruction to assemble the cabinet in "5 easy steps." "A piece of cake," I mentioned to my spouse while laying down the parts, accessories and screws on the floor after taking them out of the box.

With the manual in hand I and dear wife then squatted on the tiny empty floor space amidst the clutter of the parked car and the potted plants of the super-small car porch of our compact house to assemble the parts with screw drivers, hammers and high expectation of completing the job in not more than 30 minutes. What I didn't expect was that the arrangements of the fixing holes in the components parts didn't match those shown in the instruction manual. Undeterred and with some common sense and plenty of determination we managed to assemble the parts into a semblance of a shoe cabinet by the time we got to step 5 of the manual.

With the job almost completed the last part was just fitting the two door panels. Then to our horror when we tried to fit the door panels we discovered that the holes at the bottom panel of the cabinet to mount the plastic door hinges were missing. Although not explicitly shown in the the illustrations the manual did show two hinges one at the top and the other at the bottom of the door panels. Thus by implication there should be holes to fit the plastic hinges for the door panels at the bottom panel of the cabinet.

Turning the cabinet upside down we found out that because we had fixed the bottom panel the wrong side up the holes for mounting the plastic hinges were at the bottom. As the manual didn't show clearly which are the correct sides to assemble the parts (the two sides look the same) we had erred in fixing the wrong side of the bottom panel.

By the time we realised the truth it was too late to rectify the error as we had to go to town to run some errands and also for lunch to take care of our hungry stomachs. After coming home from town we had to do some housework before we could resume work to rectify the cabinet. Including the short trip to the town, housework and the time taken to dismantle and reassemble all the parts from the time we took out the components from the package to the time we clean up and put away the tools, we had spent about 4 hours to build the modest one-compartment shoe cabinet.

Considering that I am not a hands-on DIY man being able to assemble the cabinet is an achievement already never mind about the 4 hours, of course with dear wife beside me always breathing down my neck for dragging her along with me into this little misadventure!