Leslie Dame Solid Oak Library ard File Media Cabinet, 24 Drawers, Espresso

This is the second LDE Apothecary Media Cabinet I have purchased and I love it. The first cabinet I got in the espresso finish to store my CDs and the second I ordered in the oak finish for storing my spices in the kitchen. For the price point, it is great quality, and it offers a lot of storage space yet has a fairly compact profile. This cabinet is NOT an RTA product-- it is solid wood and fully assembled. This is not the highest quality furniture, but it is not priced to be. The wood is light and the back of the cabinet is made of thin unfinished plywood, but the construction is solid and the finishing is nice. For a comparable item from a high quality furniture manufacturer, you'd pay around $1000, not $300. This apothecary style cabinet could meet a multitude of storage needs and would look great in many settings. I highly recommend it.

I just received my DVD cabinet a half-hour ago and have some initial impressions of the product. The box took a bit of a beating, but it's packed well and suffered no damage to the product. It's lighter in weight than I expected. 35 pounds or so. It's darker in color than I expected. I would have preferred a light oak color. It's dark enough that it contrasts my light oak floor and looks good alone on the floor, but does not blend well with the more traditional light oak cabinets I was hoping to place it next to. I think I would have preferred the other wood colors, but I needed it to match my oak family room as well as I could. Quality is very high, but I don't think upon close inspection that you would confuse it for a truly fine piece of furniture - but DEFINITELY a big step up from the Ikea or Big Box store furniture. If I were to see this piece in a furniture store, I think two-fifty would be my price, but it's hard to argue with this price with the free shipping. Speaking of which - I can't believe how fast it got here. I got the e-mail saying it would arrive in 4 to 7 more days - I then clicked on the tracking number to find it was already out for delivery. Took about 3 days total. The drawers are nice, work well, and slide out easily, but they don't actually have metal or plastic rails - just tongue/groove slots in the wood. While nicely made, they don't feel terribly sturdy - it would never survive in a real library catalog environment. I would not want small kids getting their DVDs from this cabinet, it would just be too tempting to hang from the drawer and break it right off. It didn't come with any inserts for the draw labels, which I thought was a bit odd. Very hard to tell if this is solid wood or laminate. It looks like it's probably laminate, but there are no obvious seams to give it away and I think a lot of pieces may be real oak. Nicely done. It seems the other woods they offer would have to be laminate, as solid walnut would cost more than this. I wish it wasn't made in China. I was hoping as an intermediate level piece of furniture it might have had domestic origins. So - nice piece, good quality, decent but not fantastic price. I wish it were a bit lighter, but I may consider buying a second one in the walnut color for my office. IMPORTANT NOTE: I just tried actually loading DVDs into this cabinet. DVDs only fit in in one direction (spines facing up, as most people would want - not flat, or standing on end). The problem is, I don't think there's a way to remove the drawers, and while they should hold about 9 standard DVD cases per drawer, once you get more than 4 cases in any of the TOP drawers, you can't get them out because they hit the top panel of the cabinet with no extra room to angle them out, so don't plan on putting many discs in the top row. If this was my intended use, I would be pretty ticked off right about now. Fortunately, I decided I was going to store my DVDs in paper sleeves (in which case you can get 50+ in each drawer). It works well for that, but note that the tolerances are still very tight. There's less than an eighth of an inch clearance with the DVD paper sleeves (or CD cases), so don't plan on storing the larger size cases in here. (By the way - if you go my route, Amazon sells a 1,000 pack of black (with window) sleeves for under twenty-five bucks, and I was very happy with the quality. Look for my review if you have trouble finding the item.)

Much like DaxRunner, I didn't heed the poor reviews but I should've and saved myself $200+. The first one arrived with the back coming off, a common problem it would seem. I returned it and got a replacement where the back was also coming away. So, I decided to fix it myself and make do with it. Next, one of the drawer runners came off. Oh well, I just glued it back on. Next, one of the drawer bottoms started coming away. I'm starting to get pissed off but I hammer in some small nails to secure it. Now today when I was putting away some cds the bottom of the drawer cracked in half and all of the cds fell out. At this point I want to take an axe to this thing and use it as very expensive firewood. The back of the cabinet and the drawer bottoms are made of the cheapest, brittlest, thinnest plywood you could ever hope to find. One star for being aesthetically pleasing, minus 10 stars for quality. Save your money and put it towards buying a decent piece of furniture that will last for decades.

So I really read all the reviews on this, decided on the Walnut because it seemed less likely to have veneer in it, and took a chance, thinking, "I'll just repair the loose back and drawer bottoms if the cabinet and drawers themselves are solid enough". What the heck, it was faster than building it myself. After getting delivered the wrong item initially, it did arrive today. Notes: 1) this was NOT double boxed, as it says it is, and the carton had some tears in it (see pics). 2) The back panel was indeed broken off, the staples ripped right through the thin wood. 3) the bottom frame is made from hardwood pieces, fastened with a staple only??? (see pics). At least they used a screw for the corners, and I put some felt sliders on the bottom so the staples wouldn't scratch my floors. 4) Drawer bottoms are indeed very thin wood, not rice paper as one reviewer put it. Maybe that feedback got to the manufacturer and they changed the construction? And, the box has a warning that the unit contains substances known in CA to cause Cancer. No warning was on the description that I could see- Amazon, please fix that as we should know. Health is not just for people in California! Bottom line, I got lucky- the cabinet itself in good shape, no scratches or dings despite only one carton packaging, the drawers all seem to work and bottoms are all attached (or most, haven't used them all yet). I think I'll keep it and fix the back, and maybe use it as a model to build a better one myself someday. Don't put anything heavy in it- I'm trying 15 CDs in jewel cases each drawer to see how it works, but can't imagine putting metal tools or hardware that has anything significant. Would be very good for sewing supplies or other lightweight crafty parts! Amazon, please get to the manufacturer and tell them to fix the back panel- come on, how hard is it to design something with a piece of plywood for a back that stays attached? I build bookcases myself and its not that hard. Until the quality is improved, this should sell for under $100, as the wood is very thin and skimpy.