Customer Reviews

Ameriwood Expert Plum Work Center with Hutch

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was a good purchase. Like I always do, I shopped online for a week, read all the reviews and, completely confused (a joke) I take a look at my budget. What I can spend is usually the over-riding factor in my decision to buy. Compared to the other desks I was looking at, this one was a very good price.

What I knew going in?
1. It's a do-it-yourself project.
2. The quality would be decent - not great, but not terrible.
3. It would get damaged in some way during transit. (I've done a lot of "put'em togethers" and it happens more often than not.)
4.The actual assembly would be a crap-shoot.

I was reluctant to buy at first because many, many, many, reviews focused on the difficulty of getting the darn thing together. They said the pieces weren't labeled, there was only an occasional note on the instructions, but it was all drawings. That it took anywhere from 12 hours to "the better part of a day" and you needed a 2nd person and a huge space to do it all. Since I couldn't afford to spend one more penny, I ordered it.

It arrived just 4 days later, and like the description said it weighed 147lbs. I unpacked it and yes, there were some scratches, mostly hidden after assembly, and one odd 'crease' on the face of the desktop.

I'm not bragging here, I just want people to know you can put this together fairly easily and I need to say the warnings in the reviews were actually a big help. Knowing what to expect made it much easier.

What I did?
1. It only took one person (unfortunately it was me).
2. I put it together in a furnished home office, in an 8' x 6' area.
3. It took a lot of patience. I didn't rush the preparation.
4. Out of 44 pieces of wood and larger hardware, ONLY 2 WERE NOT LABELED.
5. Yes, the instructions had almost no words, but the illustrations were easy to follow.
6. Did I mention it took a lot of patience?

The photos and color on the website are accurate, the adjustable shelves are spaced well. The only thing I'm very displeased with is the fact I didn't realize there was only 1 drawer in this desk! There is a lot of unusable/wasted space.

After all is said and done, it IS a $200 desk.

P.S. Within the 1st week, the latch on the computer cabinet broke.

Let me start by saying that I could not find a desk of this size anywhere else for anywhere near this low price. So, for $199.99, if you need a large computer desk, this is worth the money.

However, assembly is a major pain. The instructions, all 35 steps, are simply diagrams with minimal writing. There are tons of boards that are not marked by any corresponding letter sticker, however the instructions name them all by letter. We spent about 12 man-hours on this assembly, and we consider ourselves experienced at putting furniture together.

Quality is another issue. Many pieces arrived chipped and scratched. The whole set is particle board, although heavy and sturdy. Some other pieces crumbled while inserting the screws. The instructions offer free replacement parts if they arrive damaged but we didn't bother.

The box arrived marked 149 pounds.

In conclusion, this desk is a decent value for the price. However, don't expect to get a lifetime-quality piece of furniture here.

I bought this product about a month ago. It came to my door in less than a week. If you lay out all the pieces and have a lot of space to work with, this desk is very fun to put together. I found it pretty easy to put together. Very sturdy desk, elegant and well worth the price. The only thing I don't care for is that there is no real drawer space. The file is great, but no insert for drawers. That would be my only real complaint, other than that it's a beautiful, solid good looking piece of furniture.

Before this desk, we had a $40 corner desk as small as can be that wasn't sturdy at all and had horrible, peeling laminate, so we could only go up from there. That desk had its two shelves underneath, so my baby would always come over and take everything off the shelves and make a big mess. So I ended up putting everything on top of the desk, which created a HUGE, towering pile of papers and drove my OCD need to organize up the wall. And then we bought a new printer which ended up being waaaay too big to fit under our desk (which is where our old printer stayed), so we decided to finally get a new desk!

I had a few criteria for a new desk...I needed it to have enough space on the actual desk for our new printer, I wanted a cabinet for our tower, a hanging file drawer, and I REALLY wanted a hutch for all my stuff. And this desk met all my requirements! As a plus, the keyboard tray doesn't stick out at all; my other desk's did, and my poor 1-year-old would bump her head on its hardware all the time.

There is A LOT of tabletop space on this desk. Plenty of room to look in a phone book or write a letter or whatever else I want to do. I LOVE the hutch. There's a ton of space for papers, extra ink, pens, CDs, and a bunch of other stuff. It sort of makes up for the lack of a drawer; I'm sure I'll figure out where to put all my envelopes and extra pens and stamps and stuff like that. I'll just have to be a little creative, but I don't have a problem with that. I actually already have a little plastic drawer system that fits nicely inside the left-hand space above the file drawer, and I can use that for now.

The cabinet for the tower is really big. We put our tower, modem, and router in there, and there's enough space to either side of the tower for some extra cords too. I love how the door doesn't have a handle on it either; that's perfect for my situation because my toddler can't figure out how to open it, and I really don't want her playing with the power button anymore.

As for putting this together, oh my gosh...it does NOT take 12 hours. That's just crazy. If you at least have a history of putting household furniture together, you'll do much better than that. My husband and I put it together in 3 or 3 1/2 hours. And we didn't even work together, since one of us had to keep the baby away from all the hardware while the other worked on the desk. He would have put it all together, but I actually enjoy that kind of thing, so I made him switch with me so I could have some fun too. The labels were missing from some of the parts, but it was simple enough to just look at the picture and find the board with the right pattern of holes on it. Also, the directions could be a little vague at times, but the pictures were ok, so we figured it out. I actually didn't read most of the instructions; I just went off of the pictures.

Oh, and we ended up actually building a special shelf for our printer because it was still a little too deep for this desk (it is a really big printer). It would have fit in the main monitor space, but I obviously wanted that for our monitor. I like it better on a special shelf anyway.

BOTTOM LINE: This desk is BIG, it's got tons of storage space, it's really sturdy and even the laminate looks high-quality (if there's such a thing). I love the color. I love everything about this desk, including the price, and even if it had taken me 12 hours to put it together, I'd still think it was worth it.

I forgot to mention...the listing says that this takes 3 to 5 days to ship, but I still paid an extra $4 for next-day shipping (with my Amazon Prime trial) just to see how fast I could get it. Well it got here less than 48 hours after I ordered it, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I saw this same desk on other websites for almost $400.00. The price on Amazon can not be beat. The desk shipped early and arrived at our home before it was even supposed to ship. Easy to put together and very sturdy and solid. It looks great and is a nice piece of furniture for our home office. I would recommend this desk to anyone who wants a quality desk and a wonderful price.

This desk is very handsome and durable. It takes a decent while to put together but it's worth it! Excellent value for the price.

the picture does't do this desk justice. Not real wood but you wouldn't know it from the way it looks. I would not hesitate to buy from this company again.

I liked this computer desk because it had a a lot of storage area on the hutch as well as a file drawer and a CD holder all at an extremely reasonable price. There was a little damage to the hutch top piece, but it is hidden behind the CD holder. I thought this desk would be hard to assemble because of all the piece, but it was actually quite easy to put together. We did have a little difficulty lining up a couple of the screw holes that hole the hutch and the desk top together, but that was pretty much the only difficult part. The back of the CPU tower storage area has a small opening that's just big enough to put the cables through (my old computer desk had a very large opening that allowed for air circulation), so it gets very hot inside of it if you close the door while your computer is on. You will have to leave the door open while your computer is on or cut out a larger opening in the back. All in all, this is a very good desk for the price - functional and nice looking.

Ordered this to replace my old desk which was warped. Assembly was straight forward even though during later steps the desk was damaged. What happens is you have to weddge the top part with the bottom, which is hard to do since lining up the holes is a chore. Ended up with damage where the cd holders go.

First thing first, it's cheap.
Then, it's quite sturdy. After a year and half of use, no structural defects.

Then the problems:
It's bloody heavy. Definitely takes 2 people to assemble, do not even try to do it yourself, you'll end up getting hurt. It can not be disassembled, which means if you need to move, you'll probably end up dumping it.
The layer that covers the composite wood surface is not as durable as it can be. Upon one year of mouse use, a lot of it actually came off under where I use my mouse.
One more thing, if you happen to have a high-end computer chassis, it will not fit into the designated space. That particular chamber is tall enough but not deep enough. And it's fairly enclosed, so I wouldn't put any high performance PCs inside, because they will very likely overheat.