Making flat-pack furniture is like choosing a shadow cabinet

Up early for a Saturday to approach the pile of menacing brown boxes in our living room, delivered from Ikea earlier this week.

All the boxes look very similar - nondescript apart from names that all sound the same. I'm not really sure what I'm going to find when I open them or, more importantly, how much difficulty they are going to put me in. It could well be that these weren't what we wanted at all.

I'm pretty certain there will be more than one screw loose, some will have visible chips on their shoulders, the instructions provided will only be of minimal help and then, after all the work of making sure all the parts are in working order, they probably won't quite fit in with our new colour scheme.

A bit like choosing a shadow cabinet really.