A king amoung babies! (Argos Beech Baby Bookcase)

Member Name: B_O_M_B_A_

Product:	Argos Beech Baby Bookcase
Date:	27/08/08 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to build and cheap as chips!

Disadvantages: Not brilliant wood quality

The Argos baby bookcase is without doubt one of the best pieces of furniture I have purchased. Now, although I haven't purchased much but that doesn't make this any less of a bargain buy, where else can you get a bookcase for less than £10? I and my partner recently purchased our new little two bedroom house; we had spent hundreds of pounds on furniture for the bedroom and lounge but we were looking for some smaller pieces to 'Fill up' the house as it were. We are both avid readers and between us have plenty of books that need somewhere to live, so for us the baby bookcase was the ideal choice.

I purchased the bookcase from as Argos store and had to carry it to my car, luckily the entire unit weight is only 9.1KG so I didn't have much of a problem, the only difficult thing is getting it in a comfortable position, the box is long and thin so it does tend to swing around a bit. I wouldn't advise the elderly, very young, disabled or weaker person to attempt to carry it a long distance, if at all; it can get quite cumbersome after a while.

The packaging however was pleasingly well made, the box was sturdy and well sealed up with tape and the wooden pieces were protected by a thin layer of polystyrene, the smaller fixings were also bagged up in small plastic bags to ensure they don't flail around inside the box and potentially fall out. Considering I had only paid £9.99 for the unit I was pleasantly surprised with the overall quality of not just the packaging but the unit itself.

Upon opening you are confronted with a small bag of fixings such as nails, dowel rods, screws, small wood coloured stickers and around 7 pieces of wood. There is also a small instruction manual with clear and concise instructions on how to build the unit, it says that one person should be able to construct the unit on their own. I would however disagree, although I managed on my own I can see how people may struggle, especially when undergoing the stage where you have to attach the sides to the base, although the pieces aren't heavy it is awfully tricky. I was happy to find that all of the pieces were present and in good order, it took me around 25 minutes to complete and at the end I hadn't even broken a sweat. Now I bet your wondering what the wood coloured stickers are for, well, where you screw the pieces together in some cases the screws are visible. You simple have to stick the stickers over the screws and they disappear, brilliant for such a cheap unit.

The unit is very sturdy and will easily hold as many books as you can fit on the shelves, the beech colour works well in a lighter room, we have ours on a magnolia wall and it looks great. Unless you really analyse the unit you can't tell it is made of cheap material and the shelves are even adjustable so you can vary your book collection. All you need to do is pull the shelves out, move the shelve holding plugs into the height relevant holes and replace the shelves, the plugs even have little plastic grippers to stop the shelves moving around.

We use ours to store our house phone on in the hall, it is thin enough not to get in peoples way as they walk in the house (The exact measurements are (W)65, (D)16.5 (H)82.5cm). If you want a small and convenient unit that will take up some space and still look respectable I would definitely advise the baby bookcase, you will not be disappointed.

It can be purchase from Argos for £9.99.

Summary: A steal at less than a tenner!