1. Reconsider ever buying any piece of furniture that has to be assembled.
2. Should you weaken and buy such an item and manage to successfully put it together, for goodness sakes, keep the assembly instructions and the allen wrench that came with it. Trust me, when you decide to take it apart fourteen years later you will not remember the sequence, nor do you know what you did with said allen wrench. By the way, these are also called hex wrenches - with good reason. And I don't mean because the ends are hexagonal.
3. One of the most useful phrases to remember when getting anything apart is "righty tighty, lefty loosey." Keep repeating it to yourself over and over, because the whole thing is so trying that after a while your brain no longer functions without this reminder.
4. Every woman needs a basic tool kit if she is crazy enough to try to do things herself, especially of she is over seventy-five. Through the decades, your fingers won't be as strong and the screws, bolts, etc. will be much harder to turn, so some locking pliers are essential to turn the little hex wrenches. Who designs a tool with such a short handle anyway?
5. Have a plastic baggie handy for all the little washers, screws, and bolts. If some of them are small, it might be a good idea to put a piece of white paper under where you are working because if some of the things drop, finding them in the carpet - or where they bounce to on hard surfaces - can be an added aggravation.
6. You probably won't remember if you assembled the piece by yourself when it was new or not, but trying to figure out how to hold sections as it comes apart by yourself can be dangerous, especially when something is heavy. I narrowly missed an injury when a section fell and almost got my foot - the same foot I've broken twice in the past. So my advice is: enlist help. Or better yet, get someone to do all the disassembly.
7. Remember item #1? If you are smart enough to take my advice listed there, you won't need to know any of the rest of it.
P.S. It used to annoy me to no end that some girls or women played the "helpless" routine. Now I wonder, "why didn't I take lessons from them."
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