File Cabinet

Here's one of my Christmas presents... a file cabinet... assembly required. ;) I'd never put together any furniture before, so this was really a learning experience! It came in the box with nothing attatched, just boards and bolts and hardware. This picture came after I figured out which were the top and bottom and right and left cabinet rails, and how to tell them from the top and bottom and right and left drawer slides, AND if the little wheels went toward the front or back of the drawer:


The directions were most unhelpful. And unhelpful in three languages, too, so what you see there in the little black rectangles on page 4 that look like sufficient information actually says things like:

Unfinished Surface.
Surface non finie.
Superficie sin acabado.

Of all the things I could have been told about how to put this together, the fact that the unfinished surfaces go on the INside of the cabinet, not the OUTside of the cabinet... well, if you didn't intuitively know that, you shouldn't even be starting something like this. My favorite quote from the whole booklet:

This hole should be located here.
Ce trou devrait etre situe ici.
Este agujero debe estar ubicado aqui.


In addition to these bits and pieces, there were 24 cam dowels and 24 hidden cams, 8 flat head phillips screws, and four support pins. Also not pictured, 4 non-swivel casters, three angle brackets, two drawer pulls, one designer medallion... And yes, I was singing that to the tune of 12 Days of Christmas... :D

But finally I got to page 15, and my lovely model Libby shows that it is together and sturdy enough to support a cat:


The only problem I have now is that it's ½ an inch too tall to put where I wanted to put it, under my computer desk. Now I've got to add 4 blocks under my computer desk to raise it ¾ of an inch so it'll fit.