Sharps fitted bedroom furniture (Sharps Bedrooms)

Member Name: Disatified1

Product:	Sharps Bedrooms
Date:	19/04/07 (1614 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks good

Disadvantages: Poor design, messy installation, poor value for money

Sharps Bedroom Furniture

We moved into our present house fifteen months ago and have spent our savings refurbishing the property. My wife has always wanted fitted bedroom furniture so to celebrate her sixtieth birthday I agreed to her wishes. She had a friend who had used Sharps, and seemed quite pleased, so on that basis we asked for a home appointment from their surveyor.

I was slightly disappointed by the surveyor, who was also a basically a saleswoman, as she only offered us one design. I was of the opinion that the design did not give us sufficient storage space but she seemed confident that it would and my wife seemed to like the results so I agreed to the design. However, when she told me the price I was absolutely stunned. She quoted in the region of £6400. for three wardrobes and a dressing table, plus two bedside cabinets. Now these items are not fine specimens of the cabinet maker’s art, they are plastic covered chipboard. In fact the wardrobes are only ‘fronts’ anyway as the rears are formed by the walls of the bedroom. However. My wife really did like the look of the furniture and after some haggling with the surveyor we got the price down to around £5000. – but still expensive in my opinion. I was also struck by the very basic manner in which the design was carried out. It was hand drawn in a three dimensional kind of way which made judging the exact sizes of the wardrobes impossible. This was later to prove to be a severe shortcoming. So I signed the sales agreement and off the lady went.

Later I was to have misgivings. The back of the sales agreement had some very strange small print that I should have read first, but didn’t. One clause said that minor defects were not a valid reason for with-holding part of the payment. This seemed to me to give Sharps licence to ship the goods with minor defects leaving me to rely on their good nature to fix them retrospectively. It seemed to set a ‘character’ to their customer relationship policy that left me very uneasy.

However, things really went down hill when the fitter arrived. He cheerfully explained that he was going to make a lot on noise and a lot of mess. In fact the noise was not too bad, but the mess was significant. He also explained that it was not his responsibility to clean up after himself and this was a task that eventually fell to me.

This was the first time anyone had mentioned any mess. My expectation up to that point was that Sharps would leave the bedroom as they found it, and given that I had just redecorated it I would say that it was spotlessly clean and absolutely dust free. What a disappointment. Sharps modus operandii seems to be to build most of the furniture on site. This involves the use of power tools that fling the dust in all directions and it sticks to everything it touches. This was a total shock. I had expected it to be built in a factory and assembled on site. Although a senior person at Sharps subsequently rang me to apologise, the damage was done. I would never use them again.

As far as the design was concerned this was also a disappointment. The corner wardrobe has very poor access. Although it looked ok on the hand drawn 3D plan we now have a 45 inch wide wardrobe with only a single 15 inch doorway. This means that most of it is unusable. Well, you may form your own opinion, but I would never use them again.

Summary: Good looking furniture on the surface but poorly designed and installed in a messy old fashioned way