The ladder is shorter than it looks in the photo. Fairly cheap construction, it's very light pine. I bought it to put my sons books on and the space in between the shelves isn't tall enough to fit any of the height of a standard book, so I had to stack them horizontally, which reduced the amount of books I could fit on it. So it wasn't really effective for what I was looking to use it for. I bought another one for the kitchen, may work better in that setting.