Read reviews that mention:
I was very hesitant to order this bed, for a lot of reasons. Some of which are that these "assemble yourself" furniture things have, in the past (NOT Zinus), have been very difficult to assemble. Things like missing parts, missing instructions (!) (you name it). Gave me a definite pause.
Add all of this to the fact that I am female, and (how to put this?) "older", and don't have a lot of experience with assembling things (i.e., mostly poor experiences, as mentioned above) and that a purchase of this bed would make it THE most expensive single item I have ever purchased on Amazon - me, an Amazon customer of 20+ years standing - just about made me decide to give this bed a pass.
Boy, am I glad I read the reviews (more than 20,000 at this writing). Reading the reviews, and looking at the rating, made me decide to give this a chance.
The bed arrived in about three days on my front porch. As expected (I had read that the box weighed about 85 pounds - no exaggeration here!) I could not lift the box to carry it inside (it was just too heavy for me) so I laid it flat on my front porch (it had arrived standing upright) and opened it there.
The contents was EXTREMELY well packaged - it was a smaller box within the large box. The smaller box contained all of the parts - large and small styrofoam blocks everywhere, everything was welll-cushioned, thus un-blemished.
The small parts (fasteners, screws and such) were shrink-wrapped onto sections on a piece of cardboard, with each section labeled with the corresponding part number to the directions - as an added bonus, there was also a section labeled "spare parts", with a few extras of each. I REALLY appreciated this thoughtfulness on the part of Zinus, as this guaranteed that I would have all of the parts required.
The instructions were simple - mostly all graphic images (pictures) of the step-by-step assembly.
The reason that the instructions were so simple is that this bed is incredibly well engineered - the design has really been carefully planned and carefully thought out. Because of this, the parts and assembly pictures exactly matched all of the actual parts.
Not too much guess work here - I had one or two missteps at the beginning, only due to me inexperience in putting together such things. After more thinking, looking at what I had done and comparing it to the instruction, I saw my error, disassembled this first step, and it was smooth sailing from then on.
It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to put this bed together, only because I had to spend a few minutes at each assembly step staring at the instructions in order to understand if I was doing things correctly. Aside from the first step, I was.
If I had this to do over again (or if I had been a person with experience in such things) I'm guessing that I could have put this bed together in a half hour, tops.
And I LOVE LOVE LOVE this bed! It is beautiful, exactly what I was hoping for (I purchased the one with the headboard), although expensive (for me) it is a quality item and totally worth the price. I know I will enjoy this bed for many, many years to come.
So, if you are contemplating getting this bed, even if you are "older" and even if you have no experience in do-it-yourself furniture assembly, I would say GO FOR IT! When it comes, don't be in a rush, study the instructions, only open the shrink wrapped parts sections as you need them (and be sure to put the parts in a dish or a pan or something so that they don't roll under your chest of drawers and disappear!), take your time - and soon you will have a beautiful new bed.
The only thing I would say to Zinus is that the photos on the page for the bed were poor quality (the photos, NOT the bed), blurry and out-of-focus. This almost stopped me from buying the bed right there and then - so, Zinus: better photos, more bed sales!
Thanks for reading, everyone!! :-)