Featured Guest
blackline
August 1-15, 1996
No-Frills Furniture
It's cheap, but is it easy? To find out, we spent a long day assembling do-it-yourself desks

By Marilyn Zelinsky Syarto
Reprinted by permission from Home Office Computing, January 1996

The desk of your dreams might come in a box - at least, the desk of your budget probably does. But what will the low price cost you in terms of time and frustration? Too often, you don't find out how difficult "easy-to-assemble" furniture is until you're surrounded with a million little pieces that don't fit together.

To save you the headaches, our editor-in-chief Bernadette Grey and business manager Steve Palm - who both admit to having limited construction skills - spent the day at Bernadette's house putting together desks from Anthro, Ikea, O'Sullivan, and Rubbermaid. (Sauder, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of do-it-yourself furniture, sent a computer armoire, but it was too complicated to assemble within our time frame).

The day turned out to be a marathon of physical labor. But with a little teamwork (and a lot of aspirin), we prevailed. Here's how well the four companies delivered.

Rubbermaid's SnapEase Desk
The desk is 30 inches high by 28 inches deep by 46 inches wide and features a keyboard drawer with storage bins. The desk is available in black and eggshell white and is constructed of steel-reinforced plastic.
  • Customer number: 800-827-5055
  • Retail price: $315
  • Ease of assembly: Excellent
  • Assembly time: 30 minutes
  • Tools required: None
  • Quality of material: Excellent, if you like plastic
  • Style: Contemporary

Strengths: The instructions are easy to understand and assembly is painless. The unit is lightweight and has rounded corners.

Weaknesses: Although the material is close to indestructible, the design is unattractive. The desk doesn't have drawers and seems small for a primary workstation.

Ikea's Kurs Deskhe
Kurs desk is 60 1/2 inches high by 27 1/2 inches deep by 43 1/2 inches wide and has three drawers. The hutch features four compartments of various sizes (one has a door). The unit is constructed from particleboard with an oak veneer finish and is also available in white or black lacquer.

  • Customer numbers: 410-931-8940, 818-912-1119
  • Retail price: $249
  • Ease of assembly: Fair
  • Assembly time: Two hours and 10 minutes
  • Tools required: Allen wrench (included), various screwdrivers, a hammer, and pliers (to pull apart mistakes)
  • Quality of material: Fair
  • Style: Goes with a contemporary or traditional decor

Strengths: The desk's scale is great for a small space. Once assembled, the unit held strong even when Bernadette and Steve jumped on the desktop.

Weaknesses: The illustrated instruction sheet may look simple but it isn't practical for assembly. In fact, Steve said that the instructions were "intrinsic hieroglyphics that only someone from Ikea would understand." Drawer frames are constructed from flimsy plastic and can't take much weight. The wood crumbled when dowels were hit hard with a hammer during assembly.

Anthro's Compacta Computer Cart
The 56 inch high by 24 inch deep by 48 inch wide workstation is tubular in design and has one shelf and a slide-out keyboard tray. Made of 45-pound, industrial-grade particleboard that's been finished with scratch-resistant laminate, the shelf and work surfaces are one inch thick and have vinyl, T-molded edges. Support tubes are made of 18-gauge steel with a baked-on powder-coat finish.

  • Customer number: 800-325-3841
  • Retail price: $199
  • Ease of assembly: Excellent
  • Assembly time: One hour
  • Tools required: Custom-design screwdriver (included)
  • Quality of material: Excellent
  • Style: Contemporary

Strengths: Design is attractive and child safe. Smooth, rolling, and lockable casters makes it easy to move the unit around. The desk is fully height adjustable and very sturdy. Shelves move up and down in one-inch increments.

Weaknesses: The flat black coating on the metal legs scratches easily.

O'Sullivan's Computer Workcenter
Model #61732 features a lockable, left-hand, underdesk CPU cabinet, a file drawer, and a pullout keyboard tray with a built-in keyboard organizer. The unit measures 48 inches high by 231/2 inches deep by 531/2 inches wide and is made from particleboard with a laminate finish. The hutch features various size shelves and compartments for supplies. There's also a small lockable cabinet.

  • Customer number: 800-327-9782
  • Retail price: $329
  • Ease of assembly: Poor
  • Assembly time: Close to three hours (with the help of three other people)
  • Tools required: Flat-blade and Phillips screwdrivers, hammer, glue (included), two custom-designed wrenches (included)
  • Quality of material: Poor
  • Style: Traditional

Strengths: The deep file drawer is easy to assemble because it folds like a box. Each piece of wood is stamped with a letter that corresponds to a letter on the instruction sheet, making assembly less of a puzzle. The built-in keyboard organizer is a handy accessory.

Weaknesses: The unit has too many parts - 69 in all, including 11 types of screws. After two hours of frustration, we called O'Sullivan's toll-free assembly-assistance number and were told that it takes "a really, really long time to put [the unit] together." When we claimed that we were missing screws, the customer service representative told us that we'd have to wait a week for replacements.

Marilyn Zelinsky Syarto is the senior editor of Interiors, a magazine for architects and interior designers, located in New York City. Copyright 1996 Home Office Computing