Our services are expanding as rapidly as my winter-midriff.
Simple Assembly now lays flooring, no snickering from the back please. IKEA sells many laminate flooring systems (view range) which look rather cool in a clean contemporary sitting room. Turn on the jazz please.
If dark flooring or indeed hard bebop jazz isn’t to your taste, IKEA also does a range of laminate floor colours all with matching skirting boards. The skirting comes in white, so no need to paint it. Pretty cool eh?
So you get your floor laid by our carpenters at incredible rates – no need for you to stoop to our level getting your hands dirty painting skirting boards.
As the rugby season is now in full swing, this leaves Saturday clear for a spot of couch camping in front of the Heineken Cup.
If you do get your flooring elsewhere we will of course put it down for you. We will also fit hardwood flooring if you prefer to invest in the timeless quality of say, oak or cherry.
Thierry Henry is rather a creative chap on the football pitch. Little touches here and there and a predator’s instinct in front of goal. Now, not all of us are as handy as Monsieur Henry or indeed as creative. And it seems house prices are dropping like a French player in the box!
House prices are falling so many of us won’t be moving house anytime soon. So if you’re a little fed up with the space you’re living in, what can you do?
A remodel or makeover is the obvious answer.
The two most popular rooms to remodel are the kitchen and bathroom. These are also normally the most heavily used areas in a home. They are also the ones that will give you the best return on your investment. A makeover may seem a little daunting. Especially if you have the same level of inspiration as an Owen Wilson movie.
Sometimes it pays to have help in the creativity department, so we are pleased to announce our new Interior Architect Consulting Service.
Edge Design combine a knowledge of architecture with interior design, and have plenty experience at spatially planning and interior finishing. As one of the Founders of the Interiors Association, Elaine is passionate about her cafe and pretty well known in the industry. This is what we can now offer to you:
Telephone meeting with you during which we’ll discuss your project
Modelling of kitchen and wardrobes, bathrooms, etc. in the IKEA home planner programme
We’ll email the images to you for comments
Email correspondence or telephone meeting to discuss amendments to the design
Design is amended as agreed and revised visuals are emailed to you for comments
Steps 4 & 5 are repeated as required
Final drawings are sent to you and a 3D model is uploaded to the Ikea website
Elaine will meet you in IKEA and be there to help you when you are in the store to make the purchase.
So not only will your makover be discussed, planned and drawn up for you, you will also have Elaine in the store with you to give you constant creative advice. I don’t know about you, but it’d be a dream come true to have my own interior architect walking the store with me! All this at our usual affordable prices.
Give us a call and we can get the ball rolling. Go on put a little Va Va Voom! in your life.
We’ve been getting a few calls lately asking if we assemble other furniture apart from Ikea. The short answer is, YES!
There are a range of places that sell flatpack furniture, Argos, Woodies and even Lidil to name a few. In fact any shop that sells furniture will sell a range of items which come flatpack.
So no matter where you buy your furniture we can assemble it for you. So give us a call, no matter what the item is. Or where you got it from we’ll do it.
We now include ‘basic Swedish’ in the languages that we speak. We are experts on the IKEA product catalogue – are you? Play the IKEA game and find out.
You’re given a list of IKEA product names, and you must guess what the product is. Ten products are picked from the database, so every game is different!
We do baby furniture too. If you thought assembling regular furniture was hard, try it with pieces that are teeny tiny! This soon to be first time father got us out to assemble new baby furniture because he didn’t want to risk it being wobbly or in any way unstable or unsafe.
We came. We did the job. And now all they have to do is choose the teddy!
Donnycarney man John Haugh set up a business with the IKEA name in it – and very quickly the Swedish ones have come down hard against him. He’s now up in court for infringing the IKEA trademark.
One of the names we’d considered was a play on the IKEA name – IE KEA. But we rejected that because:
we might get sued by IKEA
it’s a crap name
I feel a wee bit sorry for Haugh. He said in court that because the Companies Registration Office had passed his name, he thought that he was OK. Hmm, those people in the CRO causing trouble again. The case continues.
I am a bit nosey so I like to check out people’s kitchens. There are some great examples out there, whether you like an old shaker style or formica-tastic floats your boat.
Then when you decide on your dream kitchen – give us a call. We will ask you some quick questions about what you need and then we’ll send you a quote so tasty you could call it Nigella Lawson!
We like to discuss any extra tweaks and hacks you would like up front. Do you want us to remove your old kitchen? Is there additional plumbing required? etc. We have found that this saves both your time and ours, and there are no nasty suprises when it comes to payment.
Our team is made up of experienced carpenters, so you won’t need to worry about the quality and finish when Simple Assembly is installing your kitchen.
We’ve been doing quite a bit of children’s furniture assembly lately. These bunkbeds were assembled in South Dublin for a granny who loves having her grandkids over to stay. Space conscious bunkbeds assembly, these will fit into a box room. Slightly tricky on the assembly – you’ve got to make sure you’ve got them nice and solid, you don’t want a wobbly bunkbed! Our guy has done a nice job don’t you think?
It’s funny how.. NAMA is on our side. It’s funny how you can’t put a fruit pastille in your mouth without chewing. And it’s funny how men are the ‘DIY kings’.
Well not quite. While I do know which bit of the powerdrill goes in the socket, I have to admit to hanging the odd slanty shelf – or using a folded up page of “Mens Health” under a leg of the kitchen table so dinner can be eaten in an orderly fashion and not like the last evening aboard the good ship Titanic.
We have been getting a number of calls from men. Yes I know, men do actually ask for help, although i have my theory that it was a fed-up women passenger who invented GPS.
Now whilst their tooled-up brethren may frown into their SKIL mugs, there is nothing wrong with getting a professional assembler to do a job. Egos are salved. And Saturday can go back to its rightful place as sport watching day.
Or as in the case of a customer recently who has three men in the house and a half-assembled wardrobe sitting on the long finger awaiting her fabulous collection of gunas and accompanying shoes – domestic harmony was restored.
So any men with a handful of thumbs feel free to give us a call. We are very discreet and won’t publish your failings here. And to our women readers satisfaction is guaranteed!
In the Irish Web Awards no less! These are the only awards in Ireland that are worth it. Why? Because the awards are given out based on expert and peer review. Not based on the size of the table you are buying at the ceremony (Golden Spiders). Nor is it based on the size of your email list (”Please vote for me” a la Net Visionary’s). No, the Irish Web Awards are most definitely where it’s at!
We do everything we can to deliver a quality service. And we think we do a pretty good job. But what do you really think?
Please tell us what you think by voting below. And no, your name and email address is not collected, so it’s entirely anonymous! If you do want to add a comment, just click on the little number above and feel free to have your say.
And on service. Did you know all of our assemblers are carpenters? Not just handymen. That means you can be sure your flatpack furniture assembly will be done professionally.
I saw an ad for flatpack furniture assembly being done for €7. How can that be? It’s not! Check out the pricing below. As you can see, we offer better pricing on pretty much all items. Notice how the prices below look small at a glance, eg. €7 – but they are actually prices for the components of each item!
At Simple Assembly Me Hole, we don’t penalise you for choosing a 4 drawer chest of drawers.
So what are you waiting for? Book in your flatpack furniture assembly with us today.
Update: here’s another one who’s charging €35 for a call out, then an additional 20% of the price of your furniture on top of things. How can he get away with that? It’s extremely expensive.
We’re seeing a bit of a pattern emerge on Mondays. There are always more orders on a Monday. And they tend to be for projects that are incomplete! We call these the “I started and I can’t finish” ones. And we assign these quickly. Because we know how it feels when you take out those instructions all bright and full of good intentions… the hours pass and you reach a point where you have to give up. Loved ones give counsel. Or advice on how they’d do it. What’s worse?
Don’t worry. If you have a “I started and I can’t finish” project, know that we will be round to finish it in a jiffy. And we won’t rub it in.
Do you have someone in your life who believes they’re well able for IKEA assembly jobs… and yet tables always end up a little bit wobbly, wardrobes a bit rickety, shelves a bit slopey?
That’s why we’re here. We help you get the best out of your IKEA furniture. Non-rickety assembly guaranteed!
We’re seeing a lot of customers being disappointed when they reach IKEA and find out that their desired item is not in stock.
Disappointment is one way of putting it. Distressed is another – if you’ve arranged for a babysitter, booked in delivery, and braved the rain. I can only say that you have our sympathies. And, once you let us know that you’re not going to be fulfilling your order, we can postpone everything until IKEA has your stock.
It seems that the IKEA online system and phone systems are not matching the reality of the system.
A case in point: a customer today viewed 18 items in stock online. She telephoned to confirm that and was told 5 items were in stock. When she went to the store, she was told that they were out of stock of that particular item for the past few days.
Shocking re. stocking.
I’ve not been able to come up with a solution yet. For now, just know that once you inform us in time, we can postpone your order until another day.
One of the most popular furniture assembly jobs of all is wardrobes. And why not? Who wants to face into constructing such a large item of furniture?
The good news is that we do. And we’re pretty great at it.
But there’s something I need to clarify. It’s in relation to what is a wardrobe and what is a series of pieces that make up a wardrobe.
These are wardrobes. They have 4 sides, and 2 doors:
This is a wardrobe system. Swankier than your bog standard traditional wardrobe, but oh such a stylish addition to any room. See how this one has a chest of drawers inside it? And interesting sliding doors and shelving too:
The wardrobe above is from IKEA. We recently assembled this for a happy customer. But because it is made up of 5 separately assembled pieces, we charged for 5 items and not 1. The customer understood and was happy with that.
So when you’re placing your order for a wardrobe assembly, please consider your wardrobe’s component parts. If it’s a super swanky 5 piece number, please put it down as such. That way there’ll be no embarrassment on anyone’s part when it comes to the job.
Last night I went up to IKEA for a proper shop as a real live customer. I didn’t ‘not enjoy’ the experience, but I didn’t spend much either. I had a list of things I needed – a kitchen table and chairs, a sofa bed, and some random other small stuff. All I came home with was a salad bowl!
Today I met with Sadhbh Fitzgibbon, Interior Designer Dublin and she had remarkable insights that you can use to really get the most out of your IKEA buy.
Make your sofa look its best by steaming or ironing the covers before you put them on. If you put them on straight out of the box, they look shabby already – even before use.
Same applies to curtains and cushion covers. Steaming or ironing will ensure that even the cheapest drapes hang well and add a touch of class to your room.
Make sure you buy rubber matting for under rugs to avoid slippage. You can pick this up for €3.99
Wear your rug the wrong way around for the first 24 hours. This smoothes out all corners to avoid unwanted tripping!
We’ll have more from Sadhbh in the coming weeks. If you would like to find out more about how you can use IKEA wisely to customise your home, get in touch with Sky Interiors.
Now that we’re a whole month in operation, some trends are emerging:
Busiest day: Mondays. Lots of you start projects over the weekend and can’t finish them. So we’ve had a fair few dining room suites, bedroom suites, and children’s bedrooms that needed completion.
Most popular item: Wardrobes. IKEA must be selling a stack of them. We are certainly assembling a load of them. Double wardrobes with slidey drawers are the most popular.
Most relieved: when we come and erect your shelves. IKEA are great at giving you the shelving, but they don’t really go into detail about how you can get them on the wall!
Here’s how it works. You go up to IKEA and buy up big. Then you wisely decide that life has much more to offer than the opportunity to spend half a day trying to get your head around assembly instructions! So you visit us, place your order, and next day we have someone out with you to assemble your new furniture. We do it quickly. And we use all the bits – so you know it’s a good job with no worrying bits left over!
Here’s a wardrobe and double bed that are settling in nicely to their new home:
We’ve streamlined our process. Now it works even smoother, you get to browse IKEA for as long as you like..but when it all gets a bit too much – we are only 30 minutes away!
Here’s how to order IKEA furniture delivery with us:
Order delivery with us – tell us when you’re planning to go to IKEA
We will confirm your order and give you a mobile number that you can reach us on.
When you are 45 minutes away from being done at IKEA, call or text us on the number.
Usually it takes about 45 minutes to get through checkout and pick up your stuff. So it’s a good idea to text us when you’re hitting the queues.
Pick up your stuff, take the lift to the car park. We’ll be waiting for you, will pack up your stuff and whizz it away to your home.
Please note your driver will wait for up to 15 minutes after the time you’ve told him to be there. After that, he’s got to go!
We need to register something with the Companies Registration Office. There’s a poll over on our Facebook page where you can have your say. But for those who aren’t FB inclined, please post your comments below by clicking on this post title, scroll to comments, then have your say!
Was up early on Sunday morning, clearing the vocal chords for The Business Show on RTE Radio 1. I was on to talk about the CRO’s rejection of my business name application – which I’m very disappointed about. If you were otherwise engaged on Sunday at 10am, don’t worry – you can catch the show here. (Thanks to Brian Greene for queuing it up for me.)
Following on from that, The Star picked up the story and you can catch us in today’s edition.
And this morning, our friends on the Ray Darcy show invited us back to update them on this latest bit of news. I need to come up with a name that the CRO will register. This name will be used for tax, banking, and regulatory things. Names in the running so far:
Simple Assembly Micheal (with a fada on the a)
Boring Company Name Limited
Simple Assembly Ma Thoin (as in pogue mahone)
Listeners are texting in their suggestions right now. We’ll add a poll to the Facebook Fan page tomorrow and ask people to vote. Have your say. Add your comment by clicking on the title of this post, then scroll.
You may also have heard us on Spin 103.8. All of this is great coverage. I think we might have to say Thank You to the CRO after all.
We did the right thing and applied to the Companies Registration Office to set up this business as Simple Assembly Me Hole. But our application was turned down on the grounds that the ‘me hole’ bit may be offensive.
Believe me – I’ve been around the houses on this, between supervisors, heads of department, information officers. On Monday of this week I was advised to go straight to the top and put my request in writing to the Head of the CRO himself. I duly did as I was told and spent the rest of this week trying to follow up. At 4.50pm today, the week ended with a reply from himself – the self appointed High Priest of Good Taste:
As you know one of the criteria for determining whether a business name is
undesirable is that it could cause offence. This is obviously a subjective
judgment but I have considered the decision already made and decided that
it should stand.
In accordence with Section 14 of the Business Names Act, 1963 it is open to
you to appeal the decision to the High Court.
Does he not realise that start-ups like ourselves don’t have the kind of funds it takes to ‘take it to the High Court’? We are too busy saving marriages and putting under-employed carpenters back to work.
I’m extremely disappointed about this. Especially given that the following business names have already been approved by his same office:
How can one man in the civil service get to say what I call my business? When national media has already covered this…it’s been all over the place and people love our name. It brings a smile to their faces.
How can half the population be wrong and the self appointed High Priest of Taste get to say what’s what?
*To add a comment, please click on the blog post title and then scroll down to the comment box.*
We’ve made some changes to our delivery service – and they mean even more cost savings for you!
When IKEA opened in Dublin last week, they announced their delivery prices and areas they deliver to. We’ve matched their areas and have knocked €5 off every delivery as well.
Not only that but we’ve improved our delivery service to improve delivery times as well. Now all you have to do is order online, tell us what day you’re going shopping and roughly what time. When we receive your order, we’ll send a mobile number to your phone. When you’re at the checkouts at IKEA, text us and we’ll have a van waiting at the exit to pick your goods up! Call it a VIP delivery service (Very Important Parts!)
Here’s what one of our happy customers has to say:
Yes indeed everything went great on Saturday, thank you. The delivery man was bang on time and very helpful. It would have been a nightmare without him!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Companies Registration Office is a repository of information; we tell them what we’re calling our business and they do their thing and make sure that there’s a record of it in the State.
So why are they taking it upon themselves to dictate to me what I can call my business?
I have tried to register the name Simple Assembly Me Hole as a business, but someone in there with far too much time on their hands keeps vetoing my decision on what I want to call my business. Who do they think they are – my grandmother?
I will be taking this matter up with the Assistant Registrar on Tuesday:
It’s not as if any of the words are offensive – like feck or hoor, or worse!
I’ve enjoyed a week of successful media coverage – including the Ray Darcy show after which not one member of the public complained or chose to be annoyed. Indeed The Irish Times named us as their favourite flatpack assembly company because of our name. See for yourself here.
In these recessionary times, you’d expect that the CRO, as an office of the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment would do everything in its power to support the creation of jobs and not waste this entrepreneur’s time with petty-minded bureaucracy.
In the meantime, I thought I’d just share this information here in the hope that any Sunday Business Post readers who may have encountered this problem before might know a solution? If so, please comment below.
PS – welcome oh Sunday Business Post readers… surely you’ve more things to be doing than assembling flatpack furniture? Indeed. That’s why you’re here? Allow me to direct you.
If you’re planning on heading to IKEA this bank holiday weekend, and you don’t fancy overloading your car with your purchases – order your delivery now and we will have a van waiting to pick up your stuff when you get to the checkout!
Now that’s service!
We have some slots left for assembly on Saturday, so why not book your assembly too? Who knows, your bedroom could be sporting a new wardrobe and chest of drawers by tomorrow night! Or your sitting room could be given a lift with a new couch, coffee table and chairs.
Surtido Project – the premise is that IKEA is actually a supplier of raw materials, rather than of finished products. They challenged 35 designers to go to IKEA and to come up with new products that used existing IKEA parts. Everything used in their products had to come from IKEA, including screws, seats, screens, etc. You can read about one of the entrants here (I love this one, but then I’m a sucker for lighting)
IKEA hackers – what these guys do with IKEA furniture is amazing. But sometimes quite simple. For example – why not use some of the amazing print fabric that IKEA sells to cover some of the more neutral chairs? View it here.
Right now, we’re offering assembly of IKEA flatpack furniture. The hacks are up to you!
Note: thanks to @bohoe for bringing the Surtido project to my attention. And photo credit is @yonoh.
We received an enquiry about whether we can customise an IKEA kitchen. In this case for someone with a wheelchair.
This is the kind of thing our team would eat for breakfast!
All of our experienced carpenters, fitters, and cabinet makers can make kitchens from scratch – so assembling one with a few hacks would be no problem.
Here’s how:
Complete the online order form. Select kitchen installation. In the box for more details, tell us what kind of kitchen you’ve bought, how many units, and how you want it customised. Please give as much detail as possible including a catalogue reference number if you’ve got it.
We’ll get back to you with a quote for the job.
If the price is right and you like our ideas for your kitchen, then it’s a go!
If you can’t make it to the IKEA Dublin store, the 2010 IKEA catalogues will be distributed nationwide in mid-September.
If you don’t? Well say goodbye to your weekend. And know that you’ll always be looking over your shoulder for that dodgy unit to fall into your cornflakes!
If you don’t know how a hex wrench works, and you’ve never built a cabinet box before, it’s best to leave your IKEA kitchen assembly to the professionals.
Our team of skilled and experienced carpenters specialise in IKEA kitchen assembly. Save time and avoid costly mistakes by calling in the experts.
If you found us on Google, tell us when you’re placing your order and we’ll give you 5% off the price. (We’re nice that way)
We’ve had some very positive media coverage so far. This morning I got a call from a man called Raymond. He seemed quite a self assured chap and began the call by saying ‘who are you?’. Lucky my hackles didn’t rise with such a direct question, because it was the one and only Ray Darcy calling live on air! I didn’t realise we were live, I kind of thought he might have been having a chat with a view to ringing me later, ie. when I had time to compose myself and ring my mammy and tell her to tune in! But we had a nice conversation, and even if we got 1% of his listeners to visit the site, I’d be delighted.
My mug is peering out at you on today’s Business & Leadership piece. A good piece by journalist Sorcha Corcoran who got all the facts right.
Interestingly, yesterday the majority of the traffic was coming from social networking sites and forums – Facebook, Boards, Magic Mums and Octan. Wonder how that will change tomorrow once the press and radio thing goes into the mix?
Yesterday we were in the Sunday Times (the journalist there picked us up on Twitter). That alone drove 600 visits to the site yesterday.
Friday, 31 July – we made it to the Examiner, a nice little write-up indeed:
