Day: April 15, 2024

I’ve spent literally the whole day, more actually as I didn’t finish until this evening, assembling a base for a bed for bedroom 2, what’s called a ‘sommier’ down here. It was inexpensive but I thought that as I’d sourced it from Conforama it would be of reasonable quality. But some hope. The manufacturing quality was appalling. Several of the long allen-headed screws that hold the main framework together didn’t line up with the inserts they had to screw into and it took a long time to get them to go together as I didn’t want to drill out the holes through which they passed for fear of weakening the assembly.

One of the inserts was also missing, so I’ve had to email the supplier to try to get one sent to me ASAP and I also found that one of the white-painted legs was heavily scratched when I unpacked it. It also crushed a bit when I tightened the securing screw so I may have to add some filler under the head of the screw to improve its appearance. I’ll have to touch up several areas with white paint anyway where the coverage is poor so it won’t require much more effort to make it look better.

Apart from the problems with screws not lining up, assembly required much more time and effort than I’d anticipated and my guess is that there will be some purchasers who’ll give up before completing the job. The instructions were almost too small to read without a magnifying glass and parts labelling was non-existent. I had to dis and re-assemble parts I’d put together three or four times after I’d realised what was required and the manufacturer also had the bright idea of chucking several different types of screws all together in one plastic bag. Oh what fun it was finding just the two of one type I needed at one point from among the 150 or more that were in the bag.

Despite all this, it didn’t look too bad when I’d finished. The mattress for it is due to be delivered in four days time but in the meantime I threw the duvet and pillows onto it to see how they’ll look when the bed’s ready to be used.

I’m very pleased. If I said that I’d painted the wall to match the duvet cover I’d be lying. It was pure luck. I couldn’t even remember having a duvet cover and matching pillow cases in these colours until I unpacked the bedding that I placed in storage when I moved out of my old house and I can’t for the life of me recall when they were last used. It could be years and probably is. I’ll certainly hang onto them for now though, but may end up buying a new, better ‘sommier’ for this bedroom and moving this one into bedroom three where it will get much less use. But it’ll do for now 😉