It appears that you might not be the only one who has met with difficulty and frustration when trying to put together that new wardrobe or table. But don’t let it go to far. There are experts who take the death out of Ikea. And if it is death you seek, I imagine death by chocolate is a more preferable way to go.

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.

You can order online or give us a call to discuss what you want.

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.

We work with Elaine Butler from Edge Design.

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:

1. Telephone meeting with you during which we’ll discuss  your project
2. Modelling of kitchen and wardrobes, bathrooms, etc. in the IKEA  home planner programme
3. We’ll email the images to you for comments
4. Email correspondence or telephone meeting to discuss amendments to the design
5. Design is amended as agreed and revised visuals are emailed to you for comments
6. Steps 4 & 5 are repeated as required
7. Final drawings are sent to you and a 3D model is uploaded to the Ikea website
8. 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.

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.

No don’t worry, I’m not going to mention the word. Although I’m sure you’re not immune to the point of sales and merchandising in the shops.

Shortbread and sherry is all well and good, but I think many of us would prefer something a little more permanent.

• Say a new bookcase for when you spend the tenner book token Auntie Kitty sends you every year since you where five!
• Or indeed a new kitchen in which to entertain the aforementioned dotty relative….sherry and shortbread being the order of the day.
• Prehaps you’re fed up with the halfbuilt ruin at the bottom of the garden, “Yes dear I know it was supposed to be a shed but….”
• Or when you settle down to Tubridy on Friday night and that broken spring in the sofa, makes it more turgid than Tubridy!

You know its the time of year when you have a perfect excuse to dump the old. Or, just to go out and get some new furniture.

And while you roast chestnuts on an open fire, we’ll put all your new stuff together, just leave out some biccies and a glass of milk for us……ahem!

See how the drawer glides open:

Soft lighting to make glass sparkle of an evening!

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!

Play IKEA Game

Pictured here are the lovely Mary Clare and Brian taking a break behind Samba and Timbalada.

We came. We did the job. And now all they have to do is choose the teddy!

One of the names we’d considered was a play on the IKEA name – IE KEA. But we rejected that because:

1. we might get sued by IKEA
2. 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.

More on the case here.

If you’re into something a bit funkier, IKEA offers a pick’n'mix approach.  So it should be easy to find shapes, sizes and colours to your taste. You can start searching for your dream kitchen here.

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 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!

We are up for two awards:

• Best new site
• Most useful site

Now it’s only the long list of nominees at this stage.  But keep your eyes on the Irish Web Awards website to see how we progress!

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.

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? Jump over to the order page and 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 charge €30 per item. All up.  That’s why it makes sense to order today from Simple Assembly Me Hole.

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.

That’s a promise!

That’s why we’re here.  We help you get the best out of your IKEA furniture.  Non-rickety assembly guaranteed!

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.

As with most things these days, it all boils down to cost. Verdana is a web-friendly font that was invented by Microsoft. It’s freely distributed so IKEA wouldn’t have to be facing into costs of purchasing the Futura font for its global network.

But Verdana is so ubiquitous, it’s a saving that will end up costing IKEA more in the dumbing down of its brand. Also as Verdana was designed for use on screens, it doesn’t really work that well on print, in catalogues, and on super large roadside posters.

It’s been covered in TIME Magazine. Delighted to see ‘one of our own’ Christian Hughes is name-checked in the article.  There’s even a petition to bring back the old font.

IKEA’s position that ‘only designers notice bad design’ is a little ironic given that they sell design to the masses.  Said their Art Director, “I don’t think the average consumer will react, maybe people in the advertising business.”  I think he might find he’s wrong!

Either way I”m sure this story will run for a little while.  Makes an interesting diversion from the rain…

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.

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.

• 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 a wardrobe and double bed that are settling in nicely to their new home:

Design your own space.  Drag & drop furniture.  Change background, colour, accessories.
Well cool: Space Maker

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!

The options are:

• Simple Assembly Micheal
• Simple Assembly Mahone
• Simple Assembly Mo Pholl

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.

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:

• 2831666 G-SPOT
• 288514 sex.ie
• 291701 sexpartner.ie

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.*

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!

So what are you waiting for? Order IKEA delivery service now.

Interview on Wed morning on Garrett O’Callaghan show on the new station 4FM.  Mary Rose Lyons

Great piece in Sunday’s Business Post:

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.

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.