First of all, plan the entire day to assemble this. Also, if you bought this because you dont have room for anything bigger, then spend a few minutes thinking about how you will get it all screwed together. Its easiest if you can walk all the way around the outside during assembly, but we were working in tight quarters.
The finished product is too short for an adult or teenager to sit under (on the floor) comfortably.
You might also find it useful to know that it comes in three boxes. The long box (7 feet 2 inches) has the bed parts. The flattest box (it looks like it might contain a really big framed picture) has the desk and the short bookshelf. The most normal of them all contains the dresser. You can assemble the dresser all by itself, without opening the other two boxes. But the other two are related, because the desk cant stand up by itself, and as other reviewers have mentioned, you have to put the desk in before you screw down the bed slats on that side of the bed. Each box weighs 60 or 70 pounds, adding up to about 200 pounds total. The long box needs a pickup truck if you have to drive it home from your shipping address. The other two will fit inside a minivan or station wagon.
Heres the main disappointment: Before assembling the dresser (which we did first), we swept the hard floor to make sure it was clean. But halfway through, we realized that the espresso paint had been scratched in multiple places just by gently sliding pieces across the clean floor. While there were a few pieces with small dings right out of the box (in places that turned out not to be visible when it was assembled), Im pretty sure those scratches werent there when we opened the box. So before doing the rest, we swept and damp-mopped the floor, plus we put down a soft cloth. This worked better, but it still wasnt good enough. The front corner of the desk top ended up with a couple of deep scratches. s seems to market this primarily for little kids, so it was surprising that they used such a fragile paint. Maybe the other colors have a harder finish.
Espresso finish scratches easily
First of all, plan the entire day to assemble this. Also, if you bought this because you dont have room for anything bigger, then spend a few minutes thinking about how you will get it all screwed together. Its easiest if you can walk all the way around the outside during assembly, but we were working in tight quarters. The finished product is too short for an adult or teenager to sit under (on the floor) comfortably. You might also find it useful to know that it comes in three boxes. The long box (7 feet 2 inches) has the bed parts. The flattest box (it looks like it might contain a really big framed picture) has the desk and the short bookshelf. The most normal of them all contains the dresser. You can assemble the dresser all by itself, without opening the other two boxes. But the other two are related, because the desk cant stand up by itself, and as other reviewers have mentioned, you have to put the desk in before you screw down the bed slats on that side of the bed. Each box weighs 60 or 70 pounds, adding up to about 200 pounds total. The long box needs a pickup truck if you have to drive it home from your shipping address. The other two will fit inside a minivan or station wagon. Heres the main disappointment: Before assembling the dresser (which we did first), we swept the hard floor to make sure it was clean. But halfway through, we realized that the espresso paint had been scratched in multiple places just by gently sliding pieces across the clean floor. While there were a few pieces with small dings right out of the box (in places that turned out not to be visible when it was assembled), Im pretty sure those scratches werent there when we opened the box. So before doing the rest, we swept and damp-mopped the floor, plus we put down a soft cloth. This worked better, but it still wasnt good enough. The front corner of the desk top ended up with a couple of deep scratches. s seems to market this primarily for little kids, so it was surprising that they used such a fragile paint. Maybe the other colors have a harder finish.