John's a dad-to-be who's right on the brink of buying a bunch of nursery furniture. His wife's been taking him to babies r us like every night, apparently, and he just wants to know, "Is Storkcraft any good?"
Storkcraft, as you may now (or not, depending) is a Canadian manufacturer of traditional nursery furniture. Not too expensive, in business forever, available at a department store near you, probably. Some of its pretty simple and clean-looking, like the Kayla II Changing Table above, which is only $99. [Too bad there's not a Kayla II crib, eh?]
Anyone out there have a Storkcraft love- or horror-story to help John with his biggish purchases?
Check out some Storkcraft cribs and other nursery furniture at amazon, or browse the whole catalogue (no retail) at Storkcraft.com
Not to be an un-patriotic Canadian, but I'm not a big fan of the quality of their stuff. The design is fine, and it's sturdy enough, but when we were looking at cribs, it seemed like all the Storkcraft ones had some major rough spots on the rails... as if they didn't sand them or something. Not only that, but it was on the side of the rails that faced inward.
We ended up getting a Kolcraft, I believe, which is made in Poland and smooth as butter, for about the same price.
No comment on Storkcraft, but I'll throw in my $0.02 on the changing table issue.
The open rail design looks good--now, but I've seen hthm stuffed with diapers, baby clothes, blankets--you name it. Not so attractive then. And, as we read on DT a while back, baby will just love to pull everything out.
Try an enclosed cabinet (got mine at babyuniverse.com for $80) or even a dresser on which to place a nice, concave changing pad. More coverup for baby stuff, and more potential for long term use.
Now where does one buy this Kolcraft? Thanks for the insight!
Ditto Cal - the open changing table is not a great idea! Thankfully, we only paid a whopping $10 at a garage sale for ours, but still, the boy LOVES to pull everything off of it after waking up in the morning.
The Storkcraft changing tables are not too bad. We had the foofy one that matched the Jenny Lind crib when Monster was a babe. Pretty sturdy, all things considered. It has been handed down through 4 cousins now and still looks ok.
The open shelving became toy storage when he was 8 months old and started tossing diapers around.
We had a Storkcraft crib too, which worked great until the day Monster launched himself out of it at 13 months. Take that 35" height limit seriously if you have an adventurous toddler.
We received a Storkcraft crib as a gift. I don't recall which model..Caitlin maybe? The box came without any hardware whatsoever. I tried to contact them online to correct the situation, but it didn't happen. I think it was a web form and I never received a response. However, when I called them a few days later, they were more than happy to send the hardware over and apologized for the web form incident as well as the missing hardware. So-so customer service. The crib itself is OK. No rough spots on the wood on this particular one, but the heads of the screws have some seriously rough edges..almost like they were stripped before we got them. Just cheaply made, I suppose. I find that the mechanism for lowering the side gets loose. Over appx. 4 months of use, I've needed to tighten it twice. Kind of like Ikea coffee tables.
The teething rails are pretty kewl. I have no idea if that's a standard on cribs or not.
It was easy to assemble (once I received the hardware).