By its very nature, particleboard is heavy. If you and the Missus intend to carry the shipping carton up more than a few steps, pre-position the heart medication so it'll be within desperate clutch of your clawing hand when you're prone on the ground. Or have the young bucks of the delivery service muscle the box to the front door.

As one who's written many technical instructions, I admire the illustrated assembly directions provided with the kit. Unless you can't read English or Spanish or are visually challenged, you can't go wrong. It boggles the mind to contemplate the trial and error Sauder invested in the creation of this document, and the number of unsuccessfully assembled pieces left in the company parking lot by untrained employees conscripted into trial runs. Since each kit includes a variety of wood screws, an especially nice touch is the to-scale depiction of each size and type at the relevant point in the instructions with which the builder can do a comparison to assure selecting the right one. The "duh" factor is minimized.

And speaking of screws, the number in the kit is large. Do yourself a favor and invest in a power drill/driver. However, the flip side of using such a labor-saver is to take care not to over-drive the screw into the particleboard as you may strip the hole.

The actual assembly of this file, as well as several other Sauder products (desk, bookcases), proved reasonably free of problems. We never ran short of the proper whatsits and thingymajigs. As a matter of fact, there were usually a few left over - extras included in the kit by design or error, I like to think. Our only complaint is with the drawer-front engineering. Counting the six drawers put together on this file and the desk, three finished drawers failed to close perfectly because of a front panel slightly out of kilter. And that's after following the assembly instructions to the letter, and driving the screws into the pre-drilled holes provided. In these cases, we tweaked each front's position, and attached it to the body of the drawer with self-drilling screws at points distant from Sauder's pre-drilled holes. Your on your own obtaining the self-drilling screws.

Assembly time will vary with the age and physical flexibility of the builder. This file took my wife and I about 3 hours. But we're in our mid-50s, and rising from a sitting or kneeling position on the floor was painful to see and hear. Were we just 10 years younger, it probably would've gone much quicker. Try not to age if you can help it. Or guilt-trip (a verb I just made up) any offspring into doing it with, "You'd allow the mother that bore you in agony to do all the work?".