As I mentioned in my last post, all of my questionable DIY decisions stemmed from becoming completely hyperfixated on House Flipper. This time, I even involved my son by showing him a bed from the in game catalogue that I knew he’d love. Unsurprisingly, he decided he really wanted a brand new bed RIGHT NOW because of one I’d found in the game.

On Thursday, the bed arrived. Together, we built it and turned the House Flipper bedroom I’d designed for him into reality. Gaming really does seem to have a habit of bleeding into real life for us.

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The Bed That Started It All

What’s really fun about House Flipper is that you can transform an entire house from a burnt-out shell (which, for some reason, I didn’t bother reading about because I was too excited to start flipping it) into something pristine in about an hour.

You can also move furniture around effortlessly after buying it from the magical catalogue tablet. Lifting an entire bath with one hand? No problem. Your character is apparently superhuman and can do it without breaking a sweat. If you don’t like the look of something, or want to remove all of the old furniture from a room, you simply use the sell tool, point it at the offending piece of furniture and poof, it’s gone forever. Better yet, you even get some money back.

It makes DIY feel easy, and far more possible than it actually is.

Reality hit hard on Thursday when two very strong men delivered two extremely heavy flat packs to our door. Both of us, armed with hypermobility and misplaced optimism, immediately wondered what on Earth we’d let ourselves in for.

I genuinely thought it would only take an hour. We were running out of food, so I figured we’d build the bed first and pop to Lidl afterwards to buy some dinner. It would be fine. It couldn’t possibly take that long.

I WAS VERY WRONG.

It is, without a doubt, the heaviest bed I have ever encountered. Which, to be fair, is probably a good thing because it means it’s incredibly sturdy. Unfortunately, it also meant it was incredibly difficult to put together.

Still, I remained optimistic. We’ve got this. It’ll be fine. Flat packs are easy.

Well… usually they are WHEN THE INSTRUCTIONS MAKE SENSE. These did not.

The diagrams had the screw holes on the wrong side of the wooden panels and kept enthusiastically encouraging us to put screws into the peg holes, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t work. I had to rely on common sense instead.

I’ve been getting confused a lot lately – whether that’s perimenopause, the heat, or simply being completely consumed by House Flipper induced demolition of my flat, I honestly don’t know. Either way, relying on common sense felt much harder than usual. Luckily, my son seemed to understand the instructions far better than I did and ended up translating them for me.

The bed consisted of countless wooden panels, two sizeable headboards and shelves spanning the entire length of the bed.

Following the instructions, we assembled it on its side, which initially seemed perfectly logical.

I’d put a playlist on for both of us while we worked, and “Suicide Mission” from Mass Effect 2 came on. I joked to my son that this bed was going to be my suicide mission. Seconds later, I stood up and smacked my head incredibly hard on the bed above me because it was still on its side.

It didn’t half hurt. The universe runs on physics but also comedic timing.

My anxiety immediately sprang into action and tried to convince me I’d given myself a concussion, but I carried on working anyway. I wasn’t about to let this bed beat me up and then lose to it as well. Eventually, bruised but not completely defeated, we finished building everything we could while it was lying on its side.

Then we realised. Somehow, we now had to get the heaviest bed on the planet the right way up. We took a break before attempting that part. I needed a minute to stop seeing stars.

I glanced at the time. It was almost dinner. It had already taken hours to reach this point. There would be no trip to Lidl.

House Flipper doesn’t make you assemble flat packs. You click on the catalogue, buy the bed, and it magically appears in your character’s hands. I can’t tell you how many times I wished real life worked like that.

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WHAT DO YOU MEAN INDIVIDUALLY SCREWED SLATS.

Getting the bed back onto the floor sounded easy enough.

In reality, we couldn’t exactly just let all our hard work crash to the ground and hope nothing snapped. We had to lower it down as slowly as we could.

Lowering something is always harder than lifting it. It’s the same when I’m doing bent-over rows with my bulky adjustable dumbbells. Lowering them feels far harder than getting them up in the first place. It’s probably one of the reasons I’ve never fancied going to a gym. Every time I hear people dropping barbells to the floor in Instagram videos I just think, Yep… lowering them is the difficult bit.

It took a few attempts to persuade the bed to come towards us. That’s when I really noticed how strong my son has become. He took most of the weight. I was genuinely impressed. I used to do the lion’s share of every heavy job around the house, and now he’s stronger than I am.

We did eventually get it safely onto the floor with a lot of grunting, before immediately having to deadlift the entire bed again because he wanted the rug underneath it.

Yes. We both deadlifted a bed.

Then came the slats, which I assumed would be the easy bit.

NO. Every. Single. Slat. Had. To. Be. Screwed. In. Individually. By hand. With an Allen key.

The instructions, to add insult to injury, even had a giant warning on every page:

DO NOT USE POWER TOOLS.
The use of power tools (including an electric screwdriver) will VOID THE WARRANTY.

Excuse me? There were fourteen slats. Twenty eight screws. Twenty eight screws with an Allen key.

Luckily we’d found another Allen key that happened to be the same size (WHY ARE THEY ALL DIFFERENT SIZES NOW?) so we both started working on them together. By this point, though, I was struggling. My son was doing them much faster than I was anyway, and there wasn’t really room for both of us. So he offered to finish them all while I passed him the slats.

And then… It was finished. A finished bed. And a rather impressive bump on my head that stuck around for three days.

BUT we emerged victorious over the flat pack.

More importantly, my son absolutely loved it.

I’d had one final idea while we were putting it together. The shelves had back panels, but they didn’t actually seem to add any structural support like a bookcase would. I suggested leaving them off, running an extension lead underneath the shelf and screwing it neatly to the wall.

That way he could plug everything in without cables trailing everywhere. He got VERY excited about the lack of wires.

He has so much tech and so many lamps that his room previously looked like someone had lost a fight with a bowl of spaghetti.

As an added bonus, leaving the back panels off meant the beautiful green walls showed through the shelves, which actually looked even nicer than the original design. It really is a lovely bed.

We put the mattress on, stood back, and admired it for a while before finally making dinner. By then it was well past dinner time. We’d spent most of the day building it.

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The Tale of the Missing Cardboard Bin

I had the weirdest dinner ever because I’d run out of a lot of my usual food. There was no way I was making it to Lidl or Asda. I was exhausted, and every muscle I owned was already filing a complaint.

Especially my glutes. Apparently RDLs are overrated. Just lift beds.

So, having run out of kale, my now rather sad, thin chicken burrito and accompanying salad bowl consisted of two entire heads of Cos lettuce. Honestly, I could have eaten even more.

I needed whatever energy I could find because there was still the rubbish to deal with.

A large bed comes with a ridiculous amount of plastic packaging and cardboard strong enough to package an F-16 Falcon. I fought so hard with that cardboard. My scissors wouldn’t even cut through it. I actually broke a pair of scissors trying. I had to use another pair just to cut through the industrial-strength Sellotape before resorting to using my foot to help tear the rest apart.

The cardboard recycling bin in our bin room has a tiny slot, so everything had to be cut into pieces small enough to fit through it. Apparently this is to stop people shoving entire boxes inside. This was the first time in my life I’d been genuinely tempted to become one of those people.

My son and I took the plastic packaging downstairs first.

As usual. The cardboard bin wasn’t there. It regularly seems to disappear off somewhere. Fishing perhaps? Whatever cardboard bins like to do all day. I’ve never asked. The cardboard bin is merely an acquaintance.

So the black bags full of cardboard had to spend the night loitering in my flats hallway instead creating a sort of assault course to get to bed.

They sat there taunting me because I couldn’t simply click on them and make them disappear like you can in House Flipper. That’s one of my favourite parts of the game. Trash everywhere? Just run around clicking on it and it vanishes.

Well… Except for the cockroaches. Apparently those require a hoover. If I ever had to hoover up real cockroaches, I’d simply throw the entire hoover away afterwards. There is absolutely no way I’m emptying that dust container.

All that was left to do was wait until bedtime because I genuinely couldn’t do anything else. I was exhausted. My muscles hurt. My head hurt. But we’d won.

My son had his new bed.

And seeing how happy he was made every Allen key, every piece of cardboard, every bruise, scrape and every aching muscle completely worth it.

Unlike House Flipper, real life doesn’t let you click Buy and watch a bed magically appear in your hands.

But somehow, I think it meant far more because we’d built it together.

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I Have a Complicated Relationship With House Flipper

In the days after, exhausted and fatigued, I opened House Flipper again to get screenshots of the bed for this post.

I showed my son the bedroom I’d built in-game and said, “Look, the bed that started it all.”

He asked me why on Earth I’d gone back on there, because apparently neither of us can be trusted with House Flipper anymore.

Fair play.

However, he really does love his new bed. He ended up clearing out his entire room and had a lot of fun decorating the new shelves. So, in a way, I suppose we have quite a lot to thank House Flipper for.

Whenever people say games are a waste of time, or repeat the usual nonsense about entertainment being an offence against productivity, I think about House Flipper.

No TV show or Netflix series I’ve watched has ever made me this productive.

House Flipper made me redecorate several rooms in the past, and now destroy a sofa, build a bed, reorganise a room, and spend several hours bonding with my son over the absolute audacity of flat-pack instructions.

It also gave me a bump on the head, scraped legs, glute DOMS, and a hallway full of cardboard.

So yes.

I have a complicated relationship with House Flipper.

YouTube wouldn’t let me use the original Suicide Mission from the Mass Effect OST as it had been flagged for the title. However, this guitar cover of it is epic. I give you, the music I bonked my head to. BONK.