REVIEW – When you’re starting fresh in a new house, storage space disappears fast. My friends are learning this the hard way with stacks of books, board games, and knick-knacks claiming every flat surface. They need a bookcase that can actually organize their life, and one with a drawer and doors to hide the clutter is even better. The farmhouse bookcase from Sedeta promises to solve exactly this problem, so I’m putting it to the test to see if it can really help them out.
⬇︎ Jump to summary (pros/cons)
Price: $189.99
Where to buy: Sedeta
What is it?
The Sedeta Farmhouse is a 71-inch tall bookcase made of MDF that has 3 open shelves, a drawer, and two more shelves behind closed doors.
What’s included?
- All the MDF boards and hardware required to assemble the bookcase
- Anti-tip straps
- Instruction manual
- Screwdriver
Tech specs
Dimensions: 13.8″D x 31.5″W x 70.7″H
Material:Â MDF
Color:Â White or gray
Design and features
Sedeta bills this bookcase as being farmhouse style, but that’s stretching things. While the design is rectangular and simple, it doesn’t feature a distressed look, doesn’t have exposed joinery, isn’t particularly sturdy, and doesn’t look handmade at all. That’s not to say that this bookcase is unattractive. Its all-white veneer and straight lines look like it would fit into any brightly lit home office. The combination of open and hidden shelves along with a single drawer make it versatile. I think it’s going to look fine and work well in my friends’ house.
Assembly, Installation, Setup
The bookcase arrived in a heavy box. Sedeta failed to label which side was up, so when I cut open the box, the pieces spilled out everywhere. I sorted and stacked them into piles, found all the various screws and other hardware pieces, and then took a look the manual.
Do you like assembling IKEA furniture? I hope so, because putting together this bookcase is a whole lot of that! The picture above is the overview page showing everything that will have to be done.
Overall, this is a good manual. The instructions are clear and everything is labeled properly. Every board comes with a small numbered sticker, so I always knew which parts to put together. The bags containing the hardware all had a letter, making it easy to find the right piece. Most steps in this build process are easy enough to do with only one person, but there were a few where a second pair of hands was helpful.
The boards are held together using three mechanisms. The first mechanism is a simple screw.
The second mechanism is a cam lock; and the third mechanism is a dowel pin. While the screws and the cam locks worked great, the dowel pins were a major disappointment. If you’ve ever done any woodworking, you know that dowel pins are supposed to fit in the hole perfectly and are secured using a bit of wood glue. They can be a great joinery technique. Unfortunately, the holes that Sedeta cut for their dowel pins were too large – the pins flopped around inside – and the manual doesn’t say anything about using wood glue. As designed, these dowel pins are useless. I added some wood glue every time I inserted a pin, which gave them a minimal amount of strength.
There were a handful of places where things didn’t quite align properly, like these slots for the drawer base. Every time I encountered a misalignment problem, I was able to loosen the screws, jiggle things around for a bit, and get it to align.
The Sedeta bookcase is built in four major sections. The first section was the building the drawer.
The second section was building the base.
The third section was building the top shelves.
The fourth section was adding the back, inserting the drawer, and screwing in the front doors.
The entire build process took a while to do, over an hour, and I only made one mistake. The shelves on top have small screw holes on the back into which the panels are screwed. I missed this detail and put one shelf in backwards. I went back and checked the manual, and Sedeta clearly told me to watch out for this. This mistake is all on me. I filled the hole with some white wood filler, and they are hard to see unless you are looking for them. Other than this, everything went well, and I have a nice, finished bookcase.
Performance
The Sedeta Farmhouse bookcase provides plenty of space for storing things. I added board games, books, and some LEGOs, and I could have added even more to fill up the space.
The drawer is shallower than the drawers in my kitchen, but it’s a great place for storing office supplies out of the way. The drawers slide in an out without any problems.
The cabinets are a nice addition to this bookcase, as they allow me to store plenty of items that I might not want to have on display. For example, I might have some older games whose boxes are frayed. The doors open and close easily, and the two little magnets up top hold them in place.
The biggest strength and weakness of this bookcase is that it’s made of MDF. That’s a strength in that it’s cheap; this bookcase is less than $200 on Sedeta’s website. I found several bookcases online that are made of a good hardwood, and they cost 4 to 6 times more. The MDF is, however, also the weakness, because this bookcase is nowhere near as solid and stable as a bookcase made from real wood. MDF (like pressed board) also has problems with water and with being moved. In the end, it’s a trade-off between price and durability. If you buy this, build it where you’re going to use it, and don’t move it; it should be fine for several years.
Final thoughts
The Sedeta Farmhouse bookscase is good bookcase for anyone who is just starting to build out their first home office and isn’t ready to drop the extra hundreds of dollars that a solid wood set would cost.  My friends were happy to have this bookcase, which they put in their living room and loaded it up with books and knick-knacks.
What I like about Sedeta Farmhouse Bookcase
- Versatile bookcase
- Reasonable price
- Good manual
What needs to be improved?
- Use dowel pins correctly
- Label box for proper opening
Price: $189.99
Where to buy: Sedeta
Source: The sample of this product was provided for free by Sedata. They did not have a final say on the review and did not preview the review before it was published.
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