Furniture Assembly & Storage in Durham, NC

Flat-pack is a one-way design

Durham has a lot of let housing and a lot of people who move annually, which means a lot of furniture that has been taken apart and put back together several times.

That is where flat-pack furniture stops behaving, and the reason is worth understanding.

How a cam fixing works

Most flat-pack carcasses are held together by cam locks. A bolt screws into an insert in the edge of one panel, its head sits in a circular cam housed in a hole in the face of the adjoining panel, and turning the cam pulls the bolt and draws the two panels tight.

The whole assembly depends on one thing: the insert holding in the particleboard.

Particleboard is wood chips and adhesive. It holds a thread reasonably well the first time. Each time the bolt is removed and reinserted, a little more of the material around it breaks down. After three or four cycles the insert spins in its hole rather than tightening, and the joint can no longer be pulled up.

What that looks like

A carcass that racks. Push it and it moves out of square, and it stays there.

Doors that will not line up, because the opening is no longer rectangular.

A back panel that has torn out, since the back is what keeps a carcass square and it takes the strain once the joints are loose.

Fixings that turn forever without tightening.

Tightening the cams achieves nothing, because the problem is the hole rather than the fitting.

What actually helps

Plug and re-drill. The worn hole gets a glued dowel driven in and cut flush, then re-drilled to the correct size. That gives the insert fresh material to hold in, and it is a durable repair.

Glue the joints. Flat-pack is designed to be dry-assembled so it can be taken apart. If the item is not going to move again, adhesive at the joints turns a knock-down carcass into a permanent one and makes an enormous difference to rigidity.

Fix the back properly. The back panel is what makes a carcass square. Squared up and fixed at close centres — screws rather than the supplied pins — it holds.

Add corner blocks where a unit needs help staying square.

Know when to stop. A unit with swollen panels, a torn-out back and a history of being dropped is not worth the labour, and we will say so.

If you know it will move again

Worth thinking about at the buying stage rather than after the third move:

Through-bolts and metal fittings hold up far better than cam locks in board, because the load is carried by metal rather than by particleboard.

Solid timber holds a screw in a way particleboard does not, and can be repaired indefinitely.

Fewer, larger panels means fewer joints to wear.

Turnover work

Assembly and disassembly between tenancies is normal work in Durham, and it is far better value booked as one visit for a whole property than item by item.

Worth building into the plan: anything that has already been through several cycles is likely to need the treatment above rather than just reassembling, and knowing that in advance means the right materials come along.

The older houses

Beyond the flat-pack question, Durham’s older housing stock affects assembly in familiar ways.

Floors have settled. A tall unit standing on a sloping floor is racked, and racked means the doors will not line up whatever is done to the hinges. The base gets levelled and packed before anything is built on it, and the shims disappear behind the plinth.

Walls are not plumb. A unit gets set plumb and the gap behind is accepted rather than the unit being pushed out of true. Where it shows, a scribe or filler closes it.

Doorways and stair turns are narrow. Anything approaching the size of a doorway gets assembled in the room it will stand in, which is the right approach anyway — carrying a built carcass round a turn twists it, and that is the fastest way to loosen every joint in it.

Anti-tip fixings go into the studs. In these houses the wall is frequently plaster over lath, and plaster will not carry a falling wardrobe — it holds because it keyed through the lath, and an anchor in the plaster field pulls out.

Closets are small. Houses of this period were built for far fewer clothes than anyone owns now. Building shelving and hanging to the actual opening uses the whole of it, including the height above head level that kits never reach.

Basements and damp spaces

Older Durham houses frequently have basement storage, and particleboard shelving in a damp space swells and delaminates within a couple of years. Timber or metal is the sensible choice there.

Getting a price

Tell us what the items are and roughly how many times they have been assembled before — that changes what the job is. For repairs, a photo of the loose joint and of the whole unit.

Durham is about thirty-five minutes from us, with no travel surcharge.