The Assembler

Jim McArthur assembles an IKEA coffee table in Ottawa, Nov. 19, 2015

It looked great in the showroom.

But now you have to assemble it at home.

For many people, there’s a certain, shall we say, "challenge" to buying furniture from IKEA.

“It’s difficult but it’s affordable. So that’s the trade-off, right?” sums up Trina Rytwinski as she prepared to take home a van-load of furniture from the IKEA in Ottawa.

How hard can it be? Staff at M.I.T. actually programmed robots to assemble the stuff.

But if that’s a bit out of your price range, you can call The Assembler.

“You call me up. I come into your house, unpackage your IKEA furniture from the box, and put it together quickly and easily,” says Jim McArthur,A.K.A. The Assembler.

McArthur is a former radiation lab worker with Health Canada. He’s also a handyman with, he says, a unique knack for putting together assemble-it-yourself furniture.

“A lot of people have great difficulty putting these things together and I discovered I had a knack for interpreting the instructions and getting it done just like that,” he says.

IKEA offers its own assembly service. According to its website the cost starts at $79. The Assembler will do it for $15 an hour with a 2 hour minimum.

Back at IKEA, Trina Rytwinski says she’s going to build all her furniture herself. But… “Come to my house around 4:30 tomorrow and we’ll see if I have a different tune.”