ARGH MEN. Please just read the instructions.

[MummytoMog]

BiL is doing a super job of putting together my new kitchen, with the very unable assistance of DH. I am very grateful, because I just don't have the time and it means it's actually getting done. But instead of reading the instructions when he gets stuck, he just bullys on through based on experience (of his own expensive kitchen) and doesn't bother reading the instructions or asking me. It's an Ikea kitchen. There is an art to Ikea that comes from years of experience. It is not like other furniture, especially not handmade dovetailed wood. I hate pissing all over his parade when I get these proud photos, but I really do have to point out when he's fitted the oven too low below the worktop, or a unit is in the wrong place. It's not being critical or dismissive of his hard work. It's just being right.

You have to accept that this is the way he's going to do it and decide whether you can live with that. Will it actually affect the way you can use the kitchen or is it just of case of you would have done it differently.

If you can't live with it, you need to pay a professional to do it who you can give clear instructions to.

It's more that I really don't understand why he doesn't just read the instructions. That's why they're provided. Like he guessed where the shelf should be for the oven in the cupboard, when there's actually a diagram in the instructions showing you exactly where. Or why, when I explain five times that there should be a cupboard between the built in fridge and the built in oven (because one is hot and one is cold) it takes me literally saying 'one is very hot, and one is very cold, so it's probably best if they're not right next to each other' before he actually listens to me, the person whose kitchen it is.

Anyway, professionals are just as bad most of the time (sorry to any nice kitchen fitters out there). This is why I have power points in ridiculous places and no bloody sink wastes upstairs yet. At least this isn't costing me anything, and DH is gradually getting better at DIY.

I never read instructions either, I prefer try to muddle through, sometimes it works, sometimes it's a cock-up.

You can probably divide the world into two sorts of people - those who read instructions and those who don't.

Your BIL sounds very patient.

Normally I divide it along gender lines - women read instructions and get it right first time, and men don't bother and manage through an iterative process. This probably isn't totally accurate however.

I don't think it's called being patient, having to have a very very simple concept explained to you several times, I think it's called not listening properly the first time. I don't want to be the person who has to tell someone how to do something five times. I just want people to do what I tell them when it's my bloody kitchen they're building, that I planned in painstakingly excrutiating detail over several months. When it's their kitchen, they can do whatever they like, however they like.

Their basic idea (DH and his brother) seems to be to do something the easiest possible way, regardless of whether it is the right way or results in the right outcome. The normal outcome of this is that I have to fix it afterwards. The plus side is that it doesn't take as long to do it as it would have taken me originally. The down side is that it makes me absolutely furious that they didn't just do it the way they should have in the first place.

Are you paying him to do this work?