Sauder Palladia Library With Doors, Vintage Oak

Easy to assemble

I love this bookcase, it’s beautiful and will hold many books and craft supplies. The parts were marked clearly and the instructions are very detailed. It took awhile to assemble because all those details are added separately. But well worth the time.

these look so nice in the room, have gotten many compliments. the instructions were very easy to follow and overall love these bookcases

This is the perfect furniture for our home office. It has great style and a lot of space for storage.

After assembly, it looks great in the corner. That said

A good stiff breeze could knock this thing apart! The plastic/metal cams (7F) are a joke at keeping anything in place. They wiggle around in the placement holes no matter how much you tighten them (no surprise for the paper, er, engineered wood they go in). It would have been much better off with standard hardware and dowels. The center beam (O & P) is held on with 2 of these and just flopped around.

I wound up inserting several screws and braces just to shore up the very weak design. In one attempt, I wound up cracking one of the column pieces (M & U) just trying to figure out how to get that beam to stay put and not fall of if something happen to be placed on it. When the screws didn’t work, I wound up trying to carve a channel for a metal brace (and jabbed my thumb badly in the process).

Also, the shelf for the cabinet part MUST be placed as the stoppers are placed on the floating shelf, and not a solid part of the frame. Without it, the doors just fold inward.

Sauder used to be a good name. But with some other pieces I picked up in the past years, the shelves tend to warp if books are placed on the shelves of a bookcase, which has lead me to be leery. Now that they are using sub-standard hardware and just plain bad engineering… Never Again!

I ordered 6 of these units as an alternative to built-in shelving for a room we are using as a library.

3 out of the 6 units we received had a damaged “M” piece — that’s the rounded molding on either side of the open shelves. Two of them were entirely snapped in half within the box, and the third had been crushed such that its veneer was severely cracked. It was very easy, however, to order replacements for these parts via Sauder’s website, no questions asked, and the replacements arrived within a few days. I had considered docking a star for the sheer rate of damaged units (50%, in my sample), but I think Sauder made it right so quickly and easily that they deserve their star back.

The shelves themselves look fantastic. They are a little darker than we were expecting based on the pictures, but they are indeed a very dark cherry, with a slight red hue. We have them arranged in two rows of 3 on opposing walls, and they look very good side-by-side. They are able to sit flush next to each other because there is no top or bottom molding on the sides of each unit.

The main material used is pressboard, and the moldings are little more than dense cardboard with a veneer, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them. The assembled units are very sturdy, and we have each shelf entirely filled with books with no problem.

Assembly wasn’t bad; it was about average for ready-to-assemble furniture. Sauder’s instructions are always accurate and easy to follow, and this was no exception. Almost all of the pieces, however, were missing their labels, and this made the first unit harder to assemble than it needed to be. With my second unit, I started using a drill to fasten wood screws, against Sauder’s instructions. This sped up assembly a fair amount, but I wouldn’t recommend it until you learn which screws may strip their holes, how tight they need to be, etc. The longest single part of assembly was hammering all the tacks into the backing. The most frustrating part was attaching and aligning the door hinges.

Note there is a slight design flaw with the shelving. For the lower shelf in the top, open area, a bracket holding the front piece to the side piece blocks the shelf from being slid into place on its support pins. This means you have to hold the shelf in midair while you remove two of the pins, slide it into place, and replace the pins. Pretty annoying, but nothing major.