Real Furniture Isn't for People with College Loans

In my bedroom, my father crouches close to the ground. He's wearing jeans, a long-sleeve collared shirt, and a dark-green fleece vest. In his right hand he holds a hammer. His face is solemn, and his eyes are focused down. He's staring at a small plastic bag of screws, pegs, and nails. My dad understands how to use all of these fasteners. He's worked with wood since high school, when he built a bed from scratch. The man knows his oak from his pine, his awl from his planer. But right now, my dad is confused, hesitant.

He is helping me put together my IKEA "Aneboda" bed.

My father pulls open the plastic bag and dumps its contents on the ground, separating the different fasteners into little piles. While he's doing this, my boyfriend and I start laying the particleboard pieces of the bed around him like we're reconstructing a newly discovered dinosaur. We think we know where everything goes based on other beds we've seen, but we can't be completely sure.

Dad takes two pegs from the peg pile and sticks them into the end of the footboard. We haven't taken out the instructions yet, but he doesn't care. He twists the pegs to nudge them into their holes, then lifts one of the bed's long side pieces, balances it on his knee, and pushes it into the other side of the pegs. I rush over to hold the long piece for him so he can tap-tap, tap-tap on the end of the particleboard with the hammer. I hold the piece tight. I am there for him. I am there to help.

I am there feeling guilty.

Downstairs, I have a very nice hardwood headboard. It was constructed of ash by trained craftspeople who took the time to shape it, to sand it, to varnish it right. My father gave me this headboard two weeks earlier. It was a gift, part of a bedroom set that I had picked out myself from a catalog. And the set was beautiful. I absolutely loved it.

But buying furniture is one of those adult rites of passage, like doing your own taxes, that is full of secrets. One of those secrets, I discovered, was that a headboard was only that -- a chunk of wood that sits at the top of a bed. It doesn't include a bed frame or a box spring. Two items that, for a kid just out of college, are a lot of money.

As guilty as I felt returning my father's gift, I couldn't deny that buying a bed from IKEA would be much, much cheaper. IKEA doesn't sell traditional bed frames or box springs. Rather, they sell what I would describe as mattress podiums -- fully formed, relatively stylish beds with no metal frame, box spring, or hardwood headboard required.

So here we are now. At the foot of the bed, my boyfriend screws a metal runner to the inside of one of the bed's long side panels. Up at the head, my father and I pick up a veneered overhang. It's a little shelf that sits at the top of the IKEA bed's headboard, wide enough to hold tea candles but not anything useful like an alarm clock or a lamp.

There's a little ball of tension in my stomach. Since graduating from college, I've put together an IKEA desk, an IKEA bookcase, two IKEA tables, and two IKEA chairs. Like almost everyone else my age who relies on the functional, somewhat fashionable IKEA furniture, I've gotten to the point where putting these things together is intuitive. I know what kind of joints have the wooden pegs and what kind of joints have the screws.

My father, however, doesn't have this knowledge. As I hold the overhang in place, he pauses, briefly flustered, before he starts screwing it in. It's especially frustrating to watch knowing that wood is in my dad's blood. My grandfather, a French-Canadian immigrant, founded a small wood products mill in 1958. My dad started working there when he was in 14. He left the mill to go to college, and he eventually found work as a civil engineer. After a few years, however, he came back to help with the mill, and he took over the business entirely in 1979. He oversaw everything from the creation of chair seats to a complex European machine that produced bendable wood. But in my bedroom, where we are working with veneer and pegs, my father and I put the headboard's little shelf on backwards. It's sticking out so that every time I lie down, I'll hit my head on it.