Assembly instructions
that actually make sense.

Type in whatever you bought. Get plain English, a three-minute walkthrough, and the one step everybody skips.

Mid-build and stuck? Jump to the 178 things that go wrong — cam locks that spin, drawers that will not close, crib bolts that will not line up.

Things people are building today

Nursery and baby furniture

These guides work differently, on purpose. We went through the CPSC recall database and read the manufacturers' own manuals for this category. Two things stood out. The most repeated structural failure in cribs is the mattress support — the four bolts you can never see once the mattress is in. And every nursery manual says to inspect the product "periodically" without once saying how often or what to look at.

So every nursery guide here carries the safety standard that applies, a prompt to check your model against the recall list, and a re-check schedule — the thing the manuals leave out.

How this works

Hundreds of thousands of different pieces of furniture are sold online, and it feels like each one needs its own manual. It doesn't. A Zinus bed, an Amazon Basics bed and a Novogratz bed are the same six moves. Every cam-lock dresser on earth — IKEA, Sauder, Ameriwood, South Shore — is the same twelve steps.

So instead of chasing a manual per product, Flatpack works out which of – assembly patterns your item uses, adds anything specific to – brands' hardware, and walks you through it. Type in a product we've never heard of and it still works, because the hardware underneath is the same.

Every guide gives you: a three-minute animated walkthrough you can pause and step through, the full written version in plain English, the tools you actually need and why, what to do when a part doesn't fit, and the safety step that matters — which for most furniture is anchoring it to the wall.

Covering – kinds of furniture across – patterns. Written for someone kneeling on a floor at 9pm, not for an engineer.

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Everything these guides cover

Where this comes from, and what to trust

A site telling you how to put a crib together should say where it got its information. So:

  • The safety and regulatory claims are sourced. Slat spacing, mattress dimensions, the 15-month toddler-bed floor, the 10-degree bassinet limit, the STURDY Act anchoring rule, and which ASTM standard applies all come from the CPSC and the federal regulations themselves.
  • The failure modes come from real recalls. We went through CPSC's recall database for this category. That is how we know mattress-support hardware is the most repeated structural failure in cribs, and that mattress fit causes more recalls than anything else.
  • The re-check schedules exist because manuals do not have them. Every nursery manual we read says to inspect "periodically" and none says how often or what to look at.
  • The hands-on technique is written from experience, not tested against your exact model. This is the part to treat as a knowledgeable friend rather than as the manufacturer. Where this guide and your manual disagree, your manual wins — it knows your model and we do not.

Found something wrong? That is genuinely useful — open an issue and it gets fixed.

What we don't cover

Being straight with you about the edges. Cribs and nursery furniture used to be on this list and are now covered in depth — these are what is genuinely still out of scope: