Home Improvements

“Never buy a cabinet on the Internet.” The advice was supplied by my neighbor, who doesn’t know a lot about purchasing things online but does know about cabinets. Judging by the quality of the materials and hardware in the corner TV cabinet I ordered recently (see photo), I now agree with him. Fortunately, the remedy offered by the vendor, Home Improvements, turned a depressing experience into one I can live with.

You might be wondering “What’s wrong with the cabinet? It looks great.” That’s what I thought when I saw the photo in the online catalog. Dimensions, color, design—all perfect. This one appeared to have been made for the corner I had in mind. At $250 plus shipping it was pricey for an assembly-required cabinet. But I specifically wanted a small corner cabinet and couldn’t find one locally. So I ignored the part of the catalog description that described the materials as “poplar wood and wood composites.”

Most you-build-em cabinets use the same method for assembly. Parts are joined with glued wooden dowels and an ingenious combination of cam bolts that fit into quarter-turn locking cams. At the point in the process where I attached the top, there were 15 dowels and cam bolts to align with their corresponding drilled holes. One dowel didn’t seat properly so I tapped (OK, pounded) from the top using the heel of my hand. Disaster! The dowel went all the way through, punching out about a square inch of the cheap surface veneer and creating a significant crater in the underlying wood composite. The owie is in the left front corner where the TV won’t cover it. My first reaction was “That’s a quick way to waste $270.”

I finished assembling the cabinet and began thinking about how to fix it. My neighbor offered to cover the top with Formica, but that meant spending about $70 just for the raw materials. My fallback position is to sticker over the problem once I find one with a fitting message. “Idiot” would be perfect. In the meantime I covered it with a carved wooden duck. Maybe I will glue the duck there permanently.

Without a specific solution in mind I sent email to customer service describing my experience. They wrote back right away. Declining my offer of a close-up photo, they offered two choices. Both sounded fair. I could exchange the cabinet or receive a 15 percent refund on my credit card. Returning it seemed like too much trouble, plus there were shipping charges to consider. So I opted for the refund. Now if I could just get Home Improvements to stop sending me daily email about their catalog specials.