When I split up with my husband and moved in to a privately rented house with my son I pretty much had to set myself up again from scratch as we didn't take much with us in terms of furniture. I didn't have much money really and so some items I did look to budget buys and some of them worked out well for me whilst others didn't so much! One purchase that worked out really well for me was the argos value range baby beech bookcase and I actually have three in my home now.

The reason that I chose the value range baby beech bookcase was primarily for the £12.99 price tag. At this price I was able to buy a book case for at the bottom of the stairs as well as one for both my son and my own bedrooms. Whilst I was looking for a functional piece of furniture it was paramount that it wasn't going to cost the earth too and this item really did fit the bill.

I actually reserved my items to pick up in a local store but they are available for home delivery but I do think the cost is £5.95 and so it seems only worthwhile if you are likely to be purchasing quite a few items. The book case comes flat packed and weighs 9kg. I found it easy enough to carry the book case out to the car individually and they fit nicely in to the boot of my mum's car.

When I got the boxes home I opened them up and laid all of the pieces up against the wall so that I could check that they were all there. I was pleased to see that the instructions were simple enough looking and there weren't too many steps as I am not the worlds best at building furniture it has to be said! The book case was easy enough to build even for me and whilst it is advised you have two people whilst building it I didn't feel the need for this and was able to do it on my own. I am sure most people could manage to build this quickly....it perhaps took around thirty minutes as a maximum.

When built I have to say the book case looks great quality and there is no way that it looks as though it costs just £12.99 in my opinion. The pale beech colour fits in nicely with the neutral tones in my house. The size of the book case is perfect as well for my needs as I wanted a book case that wouldn't stick out too much from the wall and so the 16.5cm depth really was perfect. The whole dimensions of the book case are 82.5cm high, 65cm wide and as I said 16.5cm deep and so it isn't an obtrusive piece of furniture at all.

My one and only issue with this piece of furniture is the fact that you have two good sized shelves and then one which is not as big as the others and in my opinion is nowhere near big enough for putting books on and so we tend to store my son's pencil case, homework and such like on the one in the hall as well as brushes and make up wipes and such like on the one in my room. The shelves can be positioned where you like and I guess the fact that both my son and I have some large books or photo albums that we want to store on the case that we have ended up with a rather small shelf but this isn't a huge issue, just one that is a little frustrating. In terms of fitting things on the book case we do have some large A4 sized hardback books which fit on the shelves just about and certainly with regards to my son's thinner books you can fit plenty on the book case despite it not being huge in size. DVD's or wii games can also be stored on the book case and I think they are really handy for just storing odd bits and bobs. The one in my son's room is covered with lego as a kind of display on the top of it where as the one in my room has my make up on top of it, and the one in the hall has photos and a large yankee candle jar!

As I mentioned I have had these book cases for over three years and in all cases they are still looking really well and do not look cheap at all. The shelves on them feel secure and are not showing any signs of bending under the weight of books or anything. The whole unit just feels well made and durable and I would have no qualms in recommending this one to you.

Thank you for reading my review!