Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Unfortunately, I've put together too many flat-packed piece of furniture in my life that I consider myself a bit of a professional in this arena. I only wish I had come across Sauder furniture before. There is a real difference between Made in the USA and that cheap import stuff. I put this dresser together this weekend for my new son and I have to say that I'm impressed with two things. The first is the overengineering of it. The drawers are double reinforced so they can hold a bunch of weight, but more importantly don't have a weak spot where the bottom of the drawer starts to sag with some weight. The slide rails are well done and include a cam that can adjust the rails so the front drawer face can be squared up. Most flat-packed furniture have a flimsy piece of cardboard for a backing. This, too, has cardboard, but has additional supports to strengthen it vertically. The second thing that impressed me was the instruction manual. Usually these feel like an afterthought and usually resemble some sort of magic spell book and not the technical manual they need to be. It took me 3 1/2 hours to assemble this, which is between the 3 and 4 hours the instruction book suggests. The book paid real attention to detail. The written instructions were clear without being superfluous. They gave clear warning about jumping the gun and not doing something that needed to wait until later (i.e. tighten a cam). The illustrated instructions were even better. Absolute attention to detail and scale. Cams and dowels were clearly drawn. Directions of piece was clearly shown. Even including key details like which side, finished or unfinished, needed to face which direction. I only had to redo 1 step of of the 17 and that was because I got hasty and didn't read the step all the way to the end. As my son gets older, we'll be looking to Sauder furniture as our first choice. Sidenote on hardware: They give you plenty. I had a bunch leftover and the instruction manual was great because it said, "You will have leftover hardware. That's fine. We give you extra." Also, I had one drawer pull that was defective and I went to the Sauder website and they replaced it no questions asked.