Furniture Assembly & Storage in Cary, NC

The strap and the plug

Every tall flat-pack item — wardrobes, bookcases, chests of drawers, tall shelving — comes with a small bag containing an anti-tip strap or bracket and a plastic wall plug.

The strap is one of the most important things in the box. The plug is close to useless in a typical wall, and the two arrive together, which is why so many straps get fitted in a way that does not work.

Why it matters

Tall furniture is stable standing still and unstable in use.

Open drawers move the centre of gravity forward. A chest of drawers with the top two drawers out has a great deal of its weight ahead of the front edge of its base. It is now much closer to tipping than it was.

Loads make it worse. Clothes, books, a television on top.

Children climb. A child using open drawers as a ladder is applying force at the worst possible height and in the worst possible direction.

When one of these goes over it does so quickly and with a lot of weight behind it. This is the reason the strap is in the box and the reason it is not optional.

Why the supplied plug fails

The manufacturer has no idea what your wall is made of — it could be drywall, plaster, masonry or timber — so they include a generic plastic anchor that will work adequately in the widest range of situations for a light static load.

In drywall, that anchor is gripping a thin layer of gypsum. It will hold a picture. It will not hold the shock load of a loaded wardrobe beginning to fall, which is a sudden, sharp force applied at the top of a long lever.

The failure mode is that the anchor pulls straight out of the board, taking a plug of gypsum with it, and the furniture goes over anyway with a strap attached to it.

What we do instead

Find the framing. A stud finder, confirmed by probing where the fixing will be hidden. Fixed into a stud, the strap has something structural behind it.

Where the item does not line up with a stud — which is common, because furniture goes where it goes — we fix a batten spanning between two studs and strap to that, or use a hollow-wall fixing genuinely rated for the load rather than the one in the bag.

Where the wall is masonry, an appropriate masonry fixing into the substrate rather than into a mortar joint.

Where the wall is plaster over lath, into the studs behind, because plaster will not carry it.

This is included as a matter of course. It takes a few minutes and it is the difference between a safety device and a piece of theatre.

The rest of the assembly

Large items get built in the room they will stand in. Anything approaching the size of a doorway does not get carried through the house assembled — a built carcass has corners that mark casings and stair walls, and carrying one round a turn twists it, which racks the frame and loosens every joint.

Floor protection down first. Flat-pack panels have hard edges and there is always a screw on the floor.

Packaging broken down and stacked, and taken away if you want that arranged in advance.

The back panel matters. It is what makes a carcass square and rigid, and it is the component most often fitted carelessly. Squared up and fixed properly, the unit stays square. Skewed, it never quite does.

Garage shelving and closet systems

Wall-mounted shelving fixes into framing. In a garage that is frequently easy, because the wall may be unfinished and the studs visible.

Freestanding racking needs packing. Garage floors slope toward the door by design, so feet get shimmed to bring the unit plumb.

Overhead racks hang from the ceiling structure, and where that is trusses, the loads and fixing positions have to suit them. A truss is designed as a system and it is not a place to improvise. Where an arrangement is unsuitable, we will say so.

Closet systems. Builder wire shelving is fixed with plastic anchors into drywall and deflects under real weight. Replacing it with shelving on cleats fixed into framing gives you something that carries what you actually put on it.

Getting a price

Tell us what the items are — model names or links are ideal — how many, and which rooms they are going in. Mention anything going upstairs and anything that arrived on a driveway rather than in the room.

Cary is about fifteen minutes from our base in Apex.