Police called to Swedish family’s Ikea nightmare

Anyone who has ever tried to assemble a piece of furniture from Swedish flatpack behemoth Ikea can attest to the fact that it can be almost tear-inducing at times. And a family in western Sweden found this out the hard way in the wee hours of Friday morning.

The family in Strömstad, near the Norwegian border on Sweden's west coast, was trying to assemble an item from Ikea at around 1am. The noise from the assembly was enough to wake their child, who soon took to screaming. The cacophony distressed the neighbours, who promptly called the police and reported that they heard screaming and banging coming from the home, wrote the Expressen newspaper.

When officers arrived on the scene, they found the couple was engaged in that most Swedish of activities, assembling Ikea furniture, and that the crying did indeed come from an infant child. It remains unclear if the baby was simply crying in need of attention, or whether it too was frustrated by the complexity of the Ikea instructions.

It's not the first time this week that police have been called out over noisy residents. On Thursday, officers from Stockholm took to Twitter to share one such tale: 

"Loud screams from an apartment worried neighbours who rang the police. It turned out to be a young couple in a toothpaste war. Not a crime."