Cute but Overpriced, Not The Best Construction
For anyone who doesn’t want to read more than one sentence, here's the bottom line: this is a wobbly cabinet with flimsy wood-veneer particle board panels, and it’s not worth the premium price. It’s crazy to me that this cabinet has received so many 5-star reviews. Target has other flatpack furniture that’s surprisingly nice quality, but this is not one of those pieces. Yes, it looks pretty, but it's not engineered any better than your typical $50 DIY cubby you'd buy for a dorm. It's just a particle board box held together with a few screws, some dowels, and hopes and prayers. They claim it has a “hardwood frame.” Is the hardwood frame in the room with us now? And did I mention that the shelves sag when loaded with even a moderate amount of weight? And OMG, the doors! They each have three adjustable concealed hinges. If you’ve ever dealt with these kinds of hinges before, you already know how annoying it can be to adjust them. Two is bad enough; having to work with three is cruel and unusual punishment. I've never wanted to yeet a piece of furniture out a window so badly. It must have taken me over an hour and a half to get the doors to close properly. A little backstory: I decided to rent one of those trendy downtown apartments in a historic building, but the settling that’s occurred over the last century or so has caused the floors to become uneven. Because the cabinet is so wobbly, I didn’t realize the uneven floors were causing the frame to go slightly out of square. This made it impossible to properly adjust the position of the doors, and it took me entirely too long to figure out what was going on. I had to move it into the spot I wanted and then adjust the feet to get it to sit right before I could finally get the doors to close properly, but they’re still not entirely right. I have the lateral adjustment screws on the hinges maxed out (the ones that adjust the gap between the doors), and I’m still left with a ¼” space between them. This shows that the doors are too narrow to begin with to properly close the gap. Bonus: one of the rattan panels on one of the doors had some damage. However, I’ve convinced myself that it adds character. Am I going to keep it? Begrudgingly, yes. After schlepping it from the mailroom to my apartment and enduring the trials and tribulations of the assembly process, I’ve formed a trauma bond with it and can’t bring myself to return it. Plus, the box it came in looked like it had gone through all seven circles of Heck. And, like I said at the beginning of this review, it is cute or whatever. This cabinet needs to be priced significantly lower than the $350 it’s currently at. If it were half that price, I might be more forgiving of its flaws, but at this cost, I expected way better quality. Buyer beware: you're paying for the aesthetic, not the engineering.
