What I charge

£40 an hour, minimum one hour, and no call-out fee.

Most flat-pack is predictable enough that I can price it over the phone:

• Bookcase or small unit — under an hour, £40
• Chest of drawers — 1 to 1½ hours, £40–£60
• Bed frame — 1 to 2 hours, £40–£80
• Desk or dining table — about an hour, £40
• Single wardrobe — 2 to 3 hours, £80–£120
• Sliding-door or modular wardrobe run — half a day or more, from £160

If you’ve had a whole delivery arrive, tell me the lot and I’ll price the job rather than the clock. A bedroom’s worth in one visit works out well below three separate call-outs.

I take the packaging away with me. That’s not an extra — it’s the bit people forget about until there’s a wardrobe’s worth of cardboard in the hallway and the recycling lorry isn’t due until a week on Tuesday.

What actually goes wrong

Flat-pack isn’t difficult so much as unforgiving. Nearly every job I’m called out to rescue went wrong in one of four ways.

Cam locks over-tightened. That’s the round metal disc that pulls the peg in. A quarter-turn past snug and it chews out the chipboard around it, and that fixing will never hold properly again. There’s no undo.

The back panel on the wrong way round, or fitted last. That thin hardboard sheet is what stops the whole carcass racking into a parallelogram. On most units it has to go in before you stand the thing up, which means catching it three steps earlier than you’d think.

Wardrobes built flat on the floor. A tall wardrobe assembled lying down often cannot be stood up again — it won’t clear the ceiling, or it twists as it goes and the doors never sit right afterwards. It has to be built standing, in its final position, which is a two-person job if you want it square.

A missing or damaged part found at step 30. By which point everything is half-built and in the way. I carry the common fixings, cams, dowels, shelf pins and the like, so a missing bag of screws doesn’t turn into a fortnight’s wait and a part-built wardrobe in the spare room.

Taking it apart and putting it back

Moving house is where flat-pack really shows its limits. Some of it dismantles and rebuilds perfectly well. Some of it is designed to be assembled exactly once, and will come apart but never go back together with the same strength.

I’ll tell you honestly which is which before we start, because it’s cheaper to know in advance than to find out in your new living room. Where a piece won’t survive the move, I’d sooner say so than take your money twice.

Should you just do it yourself?

Plenty of it you should. A bookcase, a bedside table, a simple desk — put an hour aside, lay the parts out, read the whole instruction sheet before you pick up a screwdriver, and you’ll be fine. I’d rather tell you that than charge you £40 for something you’d enjoy doing.

Where it’s worth calling me: tall wardrobes, anything with sliding doors, modular runs that have to line up across a wall, corner units, and anything you’ve already started and got stuck on. Also anything heavy going up stairs, which is less about skill than about not doing your back in.

Why me rather than a national booking app

You get me, not whoever the app assigned this morning. I’ll tell you on the phone roughly what it’ll cost and how long it’ll take, I turn up when I said I would, and I clear up and take the cardboard with me. Twenty years in the trade means I’ve built most of it before, and the things that go wrong I’ve already seen go wrong.