Oakland Rustic Oak
Storage Shelf and Hooks

I have bought several items from Cotswold the last few months and all have been excellent. This one wasn't. I still gave it four stars value for money because it is still a good result and I now like it but it required a lot of work to get there hence the one star for Build Quality. Problems included: i). The top shelf projected about 3mm off the back, this meant that the unit could not be fitted plumb to the wall, we took it down, planed it flush and put it back up ii). One of the hooks had not been pre-drilled and was missing a screw. Because the one screw had not been pre-drilled it was over stressed and sheared off trying to remove it. iii). One of the screws holding another hook does not match the others, damned if I can find one that does, actually, I need three screws so I can put the one that wan't pre-drilled back on. Cotswold, can you supply these because I can't buy them. iv) ALL the hooks are out of plumb, rotated about 1 or 1.5 degrees anticlockwise, uniformly, as if there was a template for pre-drilling and the template was wrong, I am leaving them like that because too hard to fix and the coats cover them. v). The fixing screw hole covers were cheap, obvious plastic and ludicrously coloured red/pink and totally unusable, went straight in the bin but this leaves four large, visible holes, I thought of cutting matching oak plugs out of the back of the unit but these being flush and requiring to be sanded flush would force refinishing the whole thing so I purchased four oak mushroom plugs and will glue them in shortly. The oak plugs are so cheap, why ruin a nice piece of joinery with such ugly plugs? It doesn't make sense. I had a joiner on the job, I didn't keep time sheets but at £60/hour this probably nearly doubled the price to installation. And it's not finished yet. The final result is good but what a lot of work to get there, no QA and an unwise design decision to save 50p on the plugs.

I was very happy with the hooks however I was very disappointed to have to wait 2 weeks for an item that was in stock, or pay extra for delivery. I find that unacceptable when you spend £200 on a small item.

This is a lovely product which looks great on the wall. However, it is extremely heavy and tricky to put up. We managed with two people however if you are not experienced with diy, you would probably need professional help, as other people have also said. We are also very concerned about the screws and wall plugs provided - in our opinion, these would not safely support this amount of weight on the wall. We are worried that if you were to use these, there is a risk of the product coming off the wall which would be dangerous. We bought longer & wider screws and wall plugs and drilled better holes in the shelf in order to put it safely on the wall.