Furniture Assembly Cost Calculator

About $115 to assemble one dresser, desk or bookcase, which is almost exactly the $114.40 IKEA's own assembly partner publishes for an eight-drawer HEMNES. A chair, nightstand or side table is $75 on its own and $50 each if three are done together, a bed frame with a headboard is $135, and a wardrobe is $255. Reported per-item rates run $38 to $81 for simpler pieces, with an average booking of $164 and an order minimum around $52.

Substantially, and it is the main saving available. The trip, the setup and the order minimum are shared across whatever is being built, so three nightstands cost $150 rather than $225, and three dressers are $88 each instead of $115. One small item on its own is the worst booking available. If a delivery is arriving with several things in it, have them all built on the same visit rather than calling twice.

Assume not unless the quote says so, and ask for it, because it matters more than the price. Tall furniture tips onto children, and the anti-tip hardware in the box is typically a nylon strap and a short wood screw — adequate driven into a stud and close to worthless in hollow drywall, which is where it usually ends up. Proper anchoring is a steel bracket, a lag screw into a stud where one lines up and a heavy toggle where none does: about $11 of hardware and a few minutes, or about 8% on the job here.

Anything taller than it is wide, and specifically dressers, chests of drawers, bookcases, wardrobes and any television on a stand rather than on a wall. The risk is a child opening drawers and climbing, which turns the piece into a lever. If you are assembling it yourself and the strap in the box is nylon, spend $12 on a metal bracket and find a stud — and if no stud lines up, use a heavy-duty toggle rather than the plastic plug that came with it.

Once, usually, and that is the honest answer. Particleboard tolerates disassembly about one time: the cam dowels pull their housings out of the board, so the rebuild is looser than the original and the joints never tighten up again. A wardrobe that has already moved house frequently does not survive moving a second time. Taking something apart and rebuilding it elsewhere costs about 45% more than building it new, so before paying to move a large flat-pack piece, price a new one at the destination — it is often cheaper and it will certainly be more rigid.

It is about 25% more, and the reasons are practical rather than arbitrary: the hardware bag is incomplete so fasteners have to be substituted, the cam locks have been used once and some will not bite again, and the manual has to be found online and interpreted. Every assembly price quoted anywhere assumes new, boxed and complete, so say when yours is not — a quote given on the wrong assumption turns into a conversation at the end of the job.

For a nightstand or a small shelf unit, yes — the hardware is in the box, it takes an hour and the instructions are drawn rather than written for a reason. Pay somebody for a wardrobe or closet system, where the carcass has to be square and plumb or the doors never line up and where DIY assembly goes wrong and stays wrong; for anything with more than about eight drawers, because alignment is fiddly and cumulative; for anything you cannot lift safely alone at the point it goes upright; and for several items at once, where the per-item price drops anyway.

Open the boxes and count the panels against the parts list — a missing or damaged panel stops the job and you have still paid for the trip, and panel corners arrive dented more often than people expect. Then clear the room including the spot where the furniture will finally stand, because most pieces are built in place rather than moved assembled. And decide where it goes before it is built, particularly for anything being anchored to a wall.

Ask, because it is often not included and it is worth more than it sounds. A wardrobe produces a genuinely awkward volume of cardboard — three or four large flat cartons plus protective sheets — and most curbside recycling will not take it in one collection. Having it flattened and removed is about 10% on the job here. If you are keeping it, flatten it the same day: a stack of unflattened cartons takes a surprising amount of a room for a week.

About twenty-five minutes for a chair, nightstand or side table; most of an hour for a desk, dresser or bookcase, with the drawers taking most of that; a little over an hour for a bed frame, which is more awkward than complicated because it has to be built square in the space it will stand; and most of three hours for a wardrobe, which is three or four boxes plus adjusting the doors afterwards. A multi-unit closet system is a project rather than an item — the published price for a corner PAX arrangement is $608 — so treat a run of three or more as one job.