Ikea have recently introduced a range of mattress systems to provide excellent lumber support and a good night’s sleep.

The main difference from an assembly perspective is that the slats that can be purchased for a wide variety of their beds are different to traditional slats.

Traditional Slats are supplied on a roll, where each slat is connected via two strips of fabric, so you can simply roll them onto the bed frame and in less than 60 seconds the bed is complete.

The newer Sultan slats need individual assembly, and contain multiple parts, suffice to say of the two systems available, both take around one to one and a half hours to assemble! This makes a big difference if you are paying a Flatpack Assembler to do it for you!

The slats that fall into this category are:

• Sultan Lillaker
• Sultan Lovene
• Sultan Landon
• Sultan Mane

The following photographs illustrate the additional complexity involved.

1) This is one of the rubber lugs that three of the slats will eventually slide into:

2) This is one of the side peices, the rubber lugs slide into these as shown in the next photo and these are assembled to form the basic frame:

3)

4) Here you can see the slats are slid into the rubber legs and the system starts to build:

5) Of course it isn’t that simple! A fabric ribbon, is also present to keep the slats aligned and this makes putting on each slat quite difficult/fiddly. Although I haven’t shown a photo of it here, some of the slats are doubled up for extra support and this is awkward to say the least to assemble.

6) The final slats all assembled:

Unless you have the patience of a saint and are good with yiour hands you will find this excruciatingly annoying. I know I did the forst time I did one! Further more the more complex systems with bends in them and so forth (such as the Landon and Mane) are even more tricky.