Monterey Cubby Bench

As long as you know what this item is and what it is not, it's a reasonable good value for $110. This is a manufactured wood bench which has nice style. It will house baskets magazines etc in the cubbys nicely. It is NOT a solid wood product and it will not hold up to heavy objects on top without bowing over time. It is not something to sit on.

I ordered this to go in our dining room under a window to store books, etc. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and looks of it. It was easy to put together. We ran into one problem: When assembling, don't pound too hard on the wooden pegs that fit on the underside of the top piece. We ended up damaging the top a bit. It was noticeable but not too bad. However, when we called overstock, they sent us another top piece for free and very quickly! We have been very pleased with overstock.com's service.

This is a nice looking bench and a nice size, but if I saw it in a store I wouldn't have spent over $80 for it. The material is pressed particle board so be careful not to split/shred it. The instructions could be better - we noticed 2 specific steps were missing. Thankfully my husband has lots of experience putting things together, otherwise we would've made mistakes. The bottom decorative moulding piece doesn't have any support in the center since it only attaches at the sides, so we're going to add an elbow behind it for support, since it bows in a little and could easily be damaged when moving it or bumping it with a foot by accident. The top & side moulding pieces give it a finished look, but they do reduce the hole size by 1-2" in case you look for baskets to place in the cubby holes. Also the back cover piece simply nails onto the sides and vertical boards - it doesn't recess into them, so need to be careful not to snag it when moving it around. It did arrive very quickly - less than a week - awesome!

we bought this bench to put in our garage so for the price it seemed like a great deal. it looks very nice, however, the quality of wood and instructions were pretty poor. my husband owns a contracting business and is very handy and he said the directions were confusing. also when he screwed in the top of the bench, 2 of the screws almost went completely through (now we have 2 lumps that are very noticeable). for the garage it will work, but if it were for inside, i would be really disappointed.