My husband, daughter, and I have recently moved into a new apartment and we have been searching for new furniture. Being the cook that I am, I like to spend quite a bit of time in the kitchen. Our kitchen is not very large and does not have the cabinet space required to hold all of the utensils and gadgets that I have collected over the years. I had in mind that I wanted to purchase a small buffet with a hutch. We found just what I was looking for at Wal-Mart.
The Home Trends Colonial Estate Collection Buffet with Hutch is the product I was looking forward to buying. Sounds so elegant, doesn’t it? Of course the picture on the box was just what I had pictured in my head, so my husband agreed to let me buy it (which was probably mostly just to get me off his back, but I digress). He knew he was going to have to put it together and that until he did our kitchen would still be a mess. He set out to put the thing together just last night.
As I sat at the computer, my husband unpacked the entire contents of the large box onto our living room floor. Suddenly I heard, “Dang it!” When I asked what was wrong, he replied, “Well, I have all of the parts, but no dang instructions.” Oh great! So I searched the Internet using the product name on the box, but to no avail. I decided to grab my receipt and I called Wal-Mart.
When I explained the situation to the customer service representative, he suggested that we repack the parts into the box and bring that and the receipt back to the store so that they could replace it. No way, I don’t think so! When I politely told him that the box was not even salvageable at this point, he went and got an assistant manager. I explained the situation to him, and he said, “It probably wouldn’t all fit back into the box anyway, right?” I laughed a sigh of relief. My husband took the receipt back to Wal-Mart and they grabbed the assembly instructions (which, by the way, says Assemble Instruction) out of another box for the same product. When I looked at the instruction manual, I saw that the name of the company is completely different than what is on the box. That explained why we couldn’t find the information on the Internet. Go figure! Well anyway, problem solved. Or was it?
Please read the mind-boggling continuations and conclusion in Buying Do-It-Yourself Furniture Part II, Part III, and Part IV.