I bought this product from a company called Spin Keeper. I was really excited about moving my collection off of a bookshelf and into a nice, compact cabinet, safe from collecting dust from behind wooden doors.
Assembly was mostly easy, but very time consuming. For me, it took over nine hours working by myself. I ran into several hurdles. First of all, whoever counted parts for my cabinet was drunk. There are two magnets that each have two screws holding them to the cabinet and four smaller screws to hold a metal plate to each door, but I only had three screws for the magnets and five small screws for the plates. Luckily, I had a similar screw lying around that I could use.
The instructions state that there are 40 nails, but the illustration in the instructions clearly show 48 nails being used, so if you follow the diagram exactly, you will come up short. The drunk gave me 43 nails, so I was able to slightly improvise.
At one point, the instructions tell you to use the SF612BL screws, but there are no such screws in the parts manifest. This is a minor complaint, since the screws you are actually supposed to use (SP816BL in the manifest) are bundled with the plates they screw down in a plastic bag.
The nut that is supposed to hold the lock in place can easily slip into a crooked position and become hard to tighten. In fact, it's easier to put it on crooked than it is to put it on straight. I tried to tighten the nut with my wrench, but it just turned the lock with it, sanding the hole down larger than it's supposed to be.
The most frustrating part of the construction for me was one of the shelves, which would drop all of my DVDs and tip over whenever I put enough on top of it. I had to wedge pieces of cardboard into the interlocking sections for the shelf to stay level.
After assembling the unit, I took a moment to admire the finished product. Despite being made out of mostly composite wood and a few plastic pieces, it is quite an attractive looking cabinet. But my problems were far from over.
The worst thing about this unit, the deal-breaker, is that there is clearly not enough depth to completely fill it with DVDs of variable width. See the photos I uploaded illustrating this point.
If all you have are standard-sized plastic DVD clamshells, then you should have no problems. If you're like me, like most people, your collection will have various kinds of DVD cases. Let's do some math. From the rear of the cabinet to the door, it measures almost 11¼". A standard clamshell DVD case measures just over 5¼" in width. Side by side, there is still about three quarters of an inch of space between. My box sets of Buffy The Vampire Slayer measure 5 5/8". The widest box sets in my collection (James Bond movie set and Band of Brothers) measure 5 7/8". Any combination of these slightly wider sets will either cause you to press your hand against the door for it to shut against the magnet or prevent the doors from closing entirely. You could organize your collection in an odd order that prevents the wider sets from facing each other from the door shelves, but that's a game of Tetris no one wants to play.
This would be a beautiful storage cabinet if all you wanted to store was DVDs, CDs, blu-rays, VHS tapes or games for Wii, Xbox 360 or PS3, all in standard-sized cases, but one size most definitely does not fit all. If only it had one extra inch of depth.
Flying DeLorean
+Very attractive looking design
+Top locking cabinet is handy for light security purposes
+No problems if you only have standard-sized cases
Bluth Staircar
-Not enough depth to hold slightly wider DVDs
-Cheap composite wood with easily chipping laminate; poorly cut shelf pieces
-Instructions aren't very good; likely to have the wrong amount of parts
I ordered this on May 24 and received it on May 29 talk about fast service! I was pleased to find that all the parts were shipped too WOW, what a novelty. I'd seen other reviews on another site and was concerned that it was difficult to assemble. It took us about 7 hours, but part of that time was drying time to fix a mistake we made. My husband didn't trust the quality of the wood glue provided, he said it looked like Elmers, so he used his personal choice instead.
When assembling the cabinet, pay VERY CLOSE attention to the illustrations the raw sides and finished sides are not well illustrated and we ended up putting the right side on the left and visa-versa. This mistake gave us raw edges where finished edges should have been oops! Since we used wood glue in the wood dowels, as per instructed, we messed up some parts of the wood and had to repair them. No problem it's fine now.
The bottom supports (parts M) are indented, but the instruction shows them as being even with the front and back edges of the bottom (part B). If you match the placement of the angle brackets with the holes provided, you'll get them in the right place. When you put the sides in place, the supports will align with the wood dowel holes just fine.
The one fault I found was that the wood colors aren't consistent. I realize it's hard to stain the MDF the same color as the oak laminant on the doors and top, but I don't care for the redish oak color of the MDF on the rest of the cabinet. It would also be nice if there were locks on the cabinet doors instead of just the top storage area.
Top Load Media Cabinet Oak/Black (Oak/Black) (37.25"H x 48.5"W x 13"D)
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Just received this and put it together that same day. It took about 6 hours to put together, but I took lots of breaks. This is a very heavy unit and it was a lot taller than I thought it would be, it is over 3 feet tall. It has loads of storage and seems to be very useful. Not too sure I like the top load though, because I was planning on putting a lamp on top and now I can't because it opens from the top, but I guess that means less clutter also. I think this is a really nice piece and others are really interested in getting this same piece for their houses. Not enough glue was included in this set and I used the wrong glue for the wrong pieces, but it wasn't a problem. I recommend getting some extra crazy glue to finish up this piece.
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This works great for storing all of my movies, cds and video games. The quality is pretty good for assemble it yourself furniture. It did take a while to assemble though I assembled it in about 2 and a half hours but it turned out well. I looked at furniture stores local to me and didn't see anything at all like this I do like it overall.
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At first when you see all the parts laid out on the floor it can be scary.
Take your time, read carefully, and you will have a expensive looking piece
of furniture assembled in no time. Storage space is great!
The locking system is a wonderful idea
especially if you have items you don't want the kids to have access to.
The Walnut matched perfectly. This is was a great buy!
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I just moved to a new house and the new bathroom counter is a lot smaller than what I used to have. There are also less drawers so I had to lay everything out on the counter. I hate having bottles all scattered around so I started looking for a two/three-tier corner organizer. All the ones I came across are either too big, too expensive or made with cheap plastic. This one fits perfectly in the smaller little corner and my budget. You can see the dimension of the storage space in the picture I took. Even though it's smaller than other organizers, I was able to fit a lot of stuff on it. It seems study enough so I'm hoping the top rack won't fall down later. I'll update my review it does. I also love that the design is very simple, but still stylist, and the wood color matches my cabinets.
