Avoid Target’s home furnishings
March 26th, 2006
Man, are they crap. We got a bunch of towel rods at Target yesterday, and I put them in the bathroom today. They look nice, but man, what crap construction.
I should have known I was in for a crap hour when the instructions say to drill a hole “about 1/4in diameter”. “About”? What the crap is that? Hand me that “about 1/4in” drill bit there.
Drilling with a 1/4″ bit shows that 1/4″ is on the small side. The first attempt at tapping the plastic anchors in the holes results in usable but flawed construction: the head of each anchor disintegrated before fully tapped in, thanks to my precise 1/4″ hole instead of the more correct about 1/4″ hole. Nevertheless, the holes are well-filled with plastic anchor, and the chrome bathrobe hook mounted in that spot is secure. I chalked the anchor destruction up to the fact that the holes were in a stud, instead of regular sheetrock. Better holes next time.
For the towel ring, where the holes are in studless sheetrock, the first anchor went in ok after I sort of wiggled the drill in the hole to widen it a bit. The second anchor still didn’t like its hole, and immediately buckled when I tapped it, making it useless to try to drive it in. Crap, crap plastic anchors.
So I got some of my own anchors. The towel rack was next. I wanted to use the screws that came with the rack because they’re slightly better finish, with flat, sunken heads instead of the domed heads of the screw pack that I robbed some anchors from. Plastic anchors, everything should be fine. Everything wasn’t: got one side of the rack in, and the first screw of the other side went in halfway before twist-shearing itself in half. So now I have this screw-filled hole to fix (as the other half of the rack is in, don’t want to just spackle over the hole and move the thing). Fix that, and use my screws instead of the screws that came with the racks. So now I have a mixture of screws holding this stuff in the wall, and that kind of stuff bugs the hell out of me.
The final bathrobe hook to go in uses none of the provided hardware and was the only one to go smoothly. Fuck Target, and fuck their cheap Made in China by prison labor crap. Seriously.
Mentis Fugit said:
I screw everything directly into a stud unless there’s absolutely no way it can be done. Anchors schmanchors – it’s never going to be more solid than what it’s anchored in anyway.
Ian said:
Target’s furniture quality is scandalous. We visited Target shortly after it opened a branch near us, and Amy was intrigued by a chest of drawers. I took a look and wanted to wash my hands. The drawer bases were made of cardboard — literally cardboard, not even thin wood. The veneer over the sawdustboard (what do they call that stuff again? It comes apart in chunks if you breath heavily near it) was a tissue-paper film. The runners were plastic so thin you could see them bending under the weight of the empty drawers. The feet wwere attached with a single flimsy screw, so that they were certainly to crumple sideways the third time you slammed a drawer. And so on.
They do look pretty, I’ll give them that, but I wouldn’t touch them without latex gloves on.
Vicki said:
I bought a little semi-circular table to put against the wall in our attic bedroom. A corner was damaged, so I asked for, and got, some percentage off the price, and it looks fine in place.
Of course, it will never be called upon to hold anything more challenging than a can of pop and a paperback book. And that’s all it’s really good for; looking nice and prettily supporting a small framed picture.