Jul 8, 2022 4 min read

My Allen wrench game is strong, very strong. This I learned in the way we all learn that we have this skill: by building furniture.

When I’ve bragged about my new prowess, my friends assumed I was assembling furniture from IKEA, but they were wrong. I once “assembled” a tall IKEA bookcase whose top shelf wound up facing backwards, and I swear I followed the instructions in their small typeface, but by then I’d run out of screws and inclination, and so I just lived with the bookcase like that until it eventually fell apart.

No, this time I was shopping on Amazon for a console table for books, a small kitchen table, two kitchen chairs and two counter stools. That I was able to purchase all of it for just a few hundred bucks should have been a warning that my furniture would arrive in many small pieces.

So many small pieces. Soon, the boxes showed up at my doorstep: tall skinny boxes and large square boxes and huge flat boxes. Each contained legs and shelves and seats, and tiny plastic baggies of screws and washers.

And always in its own bag, an Allen wrench, that silver elbow that would be the conduit between my clumsy hands and success.

Staring at the makings of a kitchen table, I wondered how that little nothing tool would be enough. I’d seen the tools on garage shelves and in corners of junk drawers all my life, but had never considered why they were there, or how they worked.

What primitive tools they are. The screws that held the table together were located so close to a jutting edge, every turn of the wrench caused its forearm to hit wood. I must have pulled that thing out of the screw head 40 times trying to get it tight. Are there no power versions of the Allen wrench?

Yes, but a $50 chair won’t come with a power tool – another reminder that there’s a part of me that still lives like I’m just out of college. This build-it-yourself furniture is for people who don’t own power tools yet.

As I sat there on the floor, wondering which end of that leg would attach to the seat, I regretted not springing for the money to hire an assembler to come and do this for me. Amazon offered it right there on the checkout page, but it cost almost as much as the table.

The console was the most challenging of the pieces. It took both my parents, my dad’s well-appointed toolbox and some swear words to get that one together. It’s the first thing you see when you walk through the door, and I feel proud every time. The kitchen chairs were easy. The high counter chairs were trickier, but I think I got them right.

Maybe the most satisfying part of the whole exercise was gathering up the Styrofoam and plastic baggies and cardboard and putting it all out with the trash. That heap at the end of the driveway was proof that my humble wrenches and I had accomplished something I thought I could not do.

As I was cleaning up, I found a single screw on the floor near where I was working. Was it intended for the table? The kitchen chairs? In my hubris, had I failed to attach some vital support beam to the chairs where guests would be perched?

I went around sitting on all the chairs, just to make sure. Everything seemed solid – as if I’d hired a pro to come and do the work.

But did I need him? No I did not. Me and my Allen wrench. Our game is strong.