Altra™ Chadwick Collection Corner Desk, Virginia Cherry

I'm now prepared to build Space Shuttle

This is nice little desk. It's sturdy and it looks great. But prepare yourself for beaucoup assembly. Emptying the box leaves you with a pile of oddly-shaped, giant wooden Jenga blocks, 24 various...Read complete review

This is nice little desk. It's sturdy and it looks great. But prepare yourself for beaucoup assembly. Emptying the box leaves you with a pile of oddly-shaped, giant wooden Jenga blocks, 24 various bags of shrink-wrapped fasteners, and a box of assorted hardware. I suspected challenging assembly at the store when they wheeled out a pancake thin box that weighted 195 lbs. The instruction manual is the size of a high-school yearbook. The first 30 pages describe the various screws, wood dowels, cam bolts and connectors you'll be spending the next few days getting to know. The next 30 pages are step-by-step instructions for the actual assembly, which could have easily been 100 pages, but midway through they start combining three or four steps per page. The accompanying illustrations are done very well, but the overall manual is clearly the result of permitting engineers to publish documents unsupervised. The only real quality issue I encountered was that the drawer tracks wouldn't separate apart as indicated in order mount on the drawer sides. I had to forcibly pry the pieces off and rigged up the mechanism to open and close fairly well. But at that point, my concern over suicidal thoughts outweighed my desire to have a properly closing drawer. If you are retired, take pleasure in working with your hands, have extra vacation days you're looking to fill, or simply enjoy mysteries or solving puzzles, then this is a project for you. Maybe it's good to occasionally drop out of life for a while and do something like this. But I think I missed one of my kids' birthdays.