Sauder Palladia Lateral Filing Cabinet

Positives? Shipping: Too often over the years I have received furniture in boxes that look like they had been in a plane, boat, or car that crashed. There are huge holes torn in the boxes and tops missing. So it's no surprise to find the furniture inside has damage to corners, etc. That leads to wasted time getting replacements from the seller. Not so with this box from Sauder. Extra sturdy cardboard corner pieces protected the unit inside--so that everything was pristine when the box was opened. Assembly instructions. I have assembled many pieces of furniture over the years. Too often the instructions are poorly written, featuring illustrations that do little good. I had gotten so frustrated by this, that I had vowed not to buy any more furniture that needed assembly. Until I priced wood lateral file cabinets in local furniture stores. Yikes! The prices quoted made me faint. So I searched anew for something more reasonable in cost and hoped I could get it assembled. The instructions for this unit eased my fears. My daughter helped with the first stages of assembly, and both of us noted how the instructions walked us through the many steps ever-so-carefully. These instructions were obviously written by someone adept in English--someone who also had a sense of humor! Since the instructions covered so many pages, at various stages the writer suggested taking a well-deserved break, getting a beverage, or--at the end--congratulating yourself by writing a review. The illustrations were drawn with meticulous attention to detail. I have never--never assembled a unit that had such well-organized, written and illustrated instructions. Kudos to the technical writer! The unit itself is solid in construction and well-designed. It has a feature that only allows one cabinet drawer to be open at a time, so the unit won't tip over. The drawer glides are solid (good quality metal and not flimsy plastic). Plus the glides allow each drawer to open fully. So no more will I scrape my hands trying to extract a file out of the back of a drawer. The cabinet is very attractive and will be a welcome-addition to the office I am setting up in my new home. Negatives? Assembly will take some time. This unit has extra decorative pieces which add to the assembly time. So budget your time accordingly and perhaps line up a friend or family member to help you. The unit is heavy--all press-board furniture is. So you may need a helper to get the box into the house and into the room where you want it. After it is assembled, you may need a helper to reposition it in your room. But, the positives far, far outweigh the negatives. Especially when I saw the finished product and thought, "This cost about 1/3 of the finished pieces I priced in furniture stores! $500 bucks saved? Hmm, I might reward myself with another German beverage, right after submitting this review."

First, this thing is very heavy because it is double-walled. Second, it took my wife and me almost 3 hours to assemble it. We have built a lot of furniture before and we are very anal about getting the needed tools ready (you really need a low-speed, electric, handheld screwdriver), setting up a workspace, locking up the dog, laying out and inventorying all the parts (we were missing one screw), etc. And there are a lot of parts, but they are labeled and individually bagged (keep them that way until you need them -- some screws are only an 1/8" different in length, and if you use the wrong one it can go through to the finished exterior, which you don't want to do). We did all that, followed the directions precisely, and watched the video in a few spots. For the most part, it all fit together as the instructions described. Not all the edges matched perfectly, so we used a black Sharpie pen to color a few of the spots that showed, which was fine. It was really nothing major, but we are anal. At the end, we put it into position and put in the bottom drawer, then tried to put in the top drawer. It would not close and was at a bit of an angle. We swapped drawers and realized that neither drawer would fit in the top. We spent 20 minutes trying to debug what had gone wrong without any luck. After three hours of careful work and it not working and it being way, way too heavy for us throw out without another hour of breaking it down, we were pretty unhappy. So we took photos and sent them to the manufacturer to ask for help. They responded the next business day with instructions for us to adjust the drawer side rails up or down slightly, which is a methodology not in the written instructions. So we tried that and it helped, but we still could not fully close the top drawer. One side still overlapped the edge by about 1/16" of an inch. I came up with the idea to insert a very thin washer between the side rail of the drawer that was sticking and the side wall the rail mounts on. It was tricky to do, but eventually found the right two washers and got them in place and the screws back in place and tried the drawer again. It closed by the narrowest of margins...you can not slide a piece of paper in the gap now between that drawer and the side wall, but it does close. Thankfully we were patient and careful and I had the right idea and the right parts to fix the misalignment. I doubt we'd buy it again if we had known beforehand what we were going to go through. In the end, it looks pretty nice and hopefully will hold up well. But it was a ton of work, and a lot of luck for it to come together.

Sauder gets an A+ from us for packaging, labeling of parts, clear, step-by-step instructions, and quality design and manufacturing! I had bought Sauder ready-to-assemble pieces over 20 years ago and I'm happy to report that Sauder still makes a high-quality product. The shipping box looked a little disheveled when it arrived, but the protective edges Sauder included on the box and the cushioning inside protected everything perfectly. The parts were ALL clearly labeled with letters and numbers that matched up with the instruction booklet. The different types of screws and connectors were pre-sorted, packed and labeled, and the step-by-step instructions have life-size pictures of the screws at every step to help ensure you use the right ones every time. Assembly was straightforward and only required screwdrivers, a hammer, some patience, an open space to work and a few hours of our time. The pieces and connectors all fit together perfectly. Assembly could be done by one "handy" person but I was happy to have my girlfriend's help with lining up the parts, turning a few screws and keeping me on-track. If you are new to ready-to-assemble or not handy with a screwdriver, maybe ask a more experienced friend for a helping hand. The finished cabinet is sturdy and looks great in our home office. We have the matching Sauder Palladia L-shaped desk on order. We know that will be a much bigger assembly job, but if it's as good as the file cabinet, it will be worth the effort.

Arrived on time and in good condition.....a bit fiddly to assemble but had recently assembled the matching desk so this seemed a piece of cake in comparison...

Excellent product

I bought this item to complement the matching desk I bought five years ago. The product arrives as a flat pack. It took about 3 1/2 hours to put together. The colour is a perfect match and the product is sturdy and exactly what I wanted. The front design is almost the same but comes with an additional band at the bottom of the side columns as well as at the top. The desk has the bands at the top only. I highly recommend this product. It accommodates both legal and letter size files. Such a bonus. And looks great.

Cabinet meet completly my expectations. Excellent transaction and fast delivery. Sauder's Customer service was very effective for me because I was asking for a few more screw.

This item is terrible. I put it together and besides missing screws, poor instructions and some of the wood parts being damaged it is very poor quality. The box when it came in it looked that it had been retaped a few times. Also it arrived late by a few days Not happy with this one.