TL;DR -- If you Ikea stiffed you some 101350 fluted dowels, you can buy 5/16" dowels from Home Depot, 50 for under $4.

Depending on the precise usage, however, you may have to cut them down.

One of the funniest things about Ikea is that they're scamming all sorts of bougie yuppies to save Ikea the cost of actually assembling furniture. Don't get me wrong: They're maestros at making it so most anyone who's walked past someone with a handy gene can, with enough desire, get from flatpack to functional in an hour. Still, if you're Ikea, you've got all sorts of schmoes who clock $80+ an hour at their place of employment doing $15 an hour work for you, for free. That's an amazing ability to employ the most widely distributed micro-gig workforce, allowing you to have tons more in your warehouses, save crudloads on shipping, etc etc.

But, you know what, I really enjoy putting them together. There's something about assembling the furniture that's very Lego-like, which might not be too surprising, as the companies' headquarters are a long but doable drive away from each other. Must be in the water.

Setting out space, putting together a minimalist's toolset, and solving a beginner's level brainteaser seems a small price to pay for furniture that... isn't embarrassing. Probably won't get listed by name in your will, but functionally excellent. I've put together a wide swath of Ikea choices over the years, from a kitchen table for six, with a leaf that lets it expand to eight that was so easy to assemble that it should have the Ikea label taken off, to a chest of drawers (and its slimmer sidekick, apparently no longer available) whose drawers really do slide open and closed with a special grace on those Ikea rails, to a loft/desk/closet unit with ladder for a kid that, um, was more complex to assemble.

Anyhow, as one does, I recently got a Tarva queen-sized bedframe, which comes with slats in place of box springs for $149. I've got an extra mattress and space for a bed, so... why not?

Opening it up, I was already impressed. What seemed like a great deal also seemed like $40 of plywood sitting on my bedroom floor. I mean, there's some metal for support rails and the fancy slats, but Ikea has to maintain a decent profit margin. Like it's literally just a bunch of 1"x4"s and 1.5"x1.5"s with nicely predrilled holes.

Not patient enough to stain the pine, which is likely a mistake, I did the usual.

  1. Open box.
  2. Toss aside cardboard packing spacers.
  3. Organize pieces by material.
  4. Open plastic bags of small things.
  5. Separate small things into matching groups.
  6. Scan the page in the instructions depicting the small pieces with the faintest attention. (This will be important later.)
  7. Start following instructions.

Problem: I got to step 7. of the Tarva instructions and noticed I didn't have enough dowels. Like not nearly enough. I didn't notice until I had one side assembled and screwed down, but if I only used one dowel for every two indicated on the second side, I'd make it. So that's what I did, and tightened everything up.

Well, until I got to step 9, where I needed four more. So I gave up, feeling guilty I'd skimped on the headboard anyway, and took that last half of the headboard that only had half the dowels intended back apart.

Options:

  1. Call Ikea and hope they'd mail me some dowels before, well, before too long.
  2. Wait until I'm back near an Ikea, the closest being about 3 1/2 hours' drive away.
  3. Find another dowel source.

So after taking one of the dowels with me to Home Depot, it turns out the 5/16" dowels they carry are right close, and almost exactly the right diameter. Fifty count for under $3.50!! That's got to less trouble than the cost of my time bugging Ikea for freebees.

Took them home, opened them up, and started in. Now they're a little longer than the Ikea part number 101350 dowels, but I'd noticed putting it together that longer might've be better anyhow, because leaving the dowels more than half-way out had let me catch just the end of each, making pushing the side board down and together easier. Or so I thought.

I put them in each missing hole on the middle, inner board and pushed the headboard slats in. No problem! Worked fine! Makes some sense. If you need a couple different sizes of dowel, but one length would be within tolerance and make do for each of those usages, of course Ikea just gives you a ton of the universal fit dowel. Saves them money and makes it easier for you now that you don't have to keep them organized by size. The Home Depot dowels are just over a quarter-inch longer. They work fine on the inside of the slats. That means they likely should work as-is all over!

Oops. That is what we call in the Ikea trade "an insurmountable gap".

So here's the deal: The holes on the inside can take longer dowels, but the holes on the outside can't. The drilled holes aren't deep enough. Two options.

  • Remove all the short dowels from the inside of the slats and replace with longer ones, then use those short ones on the outside.

Downside: I'd still come up three dowels short. For this to really work, you'd need to take the first half of backboard slats back apart.

For some reason I really hate taking things apart that have been put together "right" already.

... orrrrrr ...

  • Cut down some of the longer dowels.

You can guess what I did. First I put aside four Ikea dowels for the step 9 (having discovered that some usages require the regulation-length Ikea dowels, I didn't want to risk it on unknown step 9), I pulled out all the short dowels on the inside of the headboard with my teeth, just like you should when the Home Depot dowels say "Warning: Carcinogen" (hopefully Ikea dowels aren't made of the same stuff?), and went outside to hacksaw three Home Depot dowels down to Ikea 101350 dowel height.

Long story only slightly shorter: It worked! I cut the dowels down to match the stock 101350 length and poof! Didn't even have to whittle down the edges to fit; they went right in. After a bit of lining things up, the pieces went together and tightened up without a fight.

So, again, a trip to Home Depot, $3.50, and only another hour of my time and look! I didn't even have to call Ikea and wait for them to send me the missing dowels! What a bargain. And, once I got done with Tarva step 7 fully doweled, I even went ahead and finished up steps 9, 10, and 12 [sic] before writing this and going to sleep!

Good thing I got those dowels at Home Depot and saved so much time. I'm obviously in a real hurry.

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