The color is a little darker than we expected but that's to be expected depending on your color selections on your computer screen, in our case we loved it. The directions are great but there are a lot of pieces. I needed my husbands help getting things out of the box but after that I did it mostly on my own with the exception of the few times you need to flip it. It took me about 2.5 hours. Overall sturdy and exactly as pictured.