So here's a protip for the people who want to be cheapskates but don't know how: If you pay $16 for a piece of hardware meant to be anchored into the wall and support the weight of anything heavier than an 8x8 canvas, it will be made of garbage. This is a fact of life. Do not buy this if you genuinely are expecting inexplicably high quality, because you will be upset for one reason or another. With that out of the way, these are Fine. They are not obviously cheap, in that most people who visit won't glance at these and ask when you had your stroke and are you okay. That said, we put these in our master bedroom where nobody but us will ever go, and that's largely why we didn't go with anything more ornamental...that and we have a LOT of windows in that bedroom and, frankly, getting out of this as cheaply as we did was a big plus. It seems we did get luckier than some as the finials weren't crushed in shipping and the finish wasn't scratched (nor did it get scratched during installation). It cannot be stated enough how flimsy the finials are. Imagine the balls in a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit, and then imagine if that plastic was even thinner. It's worth noting that each rod comes with a pair of these, one with a narrow connector and one with a wider connector, so don't flip out if you accidentally grab the wider one and are having trouble fitting it into the narrower end of the rod. The nature of the plastic does mean, however, that if you do run into this issue and get mad and try to force it, the connector will crush and may not fit properly in the correct side afterward. Otherwise, they fit snugly...perhaps too snugly. We have resolved that should these rods be coming down, the finials, at the very least, will have to be trashed because there is likely no way to remove them without destroying them. But again...$16 per. Who cares. The metal is your basic, flimsy, cheap sheet metal, probably mostly aluminum, probably with a whole host of imperfections. You can bend the openings if you are not careful. And now, perhaps the one thing you should really be concerned with (versus the finials which seem to be the star of people's complaints), the mounting hardware. It should go without saying that you should endeavor to avoid using anchors and mount the brackets into studs. Due to our house being very, very old, we wound up having to do a mixture of both. The studs are old-growth timber, so anything mounted into them is never going to go anywhere, but the drywall is just drywall. The anchors provided in this kit are the anchors you'll find anywhere, and they do their job. Someone in the reviews said using a 1/4" bit made the pilot hole too big, but I think maybe they had a 3/8" and did their math wrong because 1/4" was the correct bit to use. Anchors went in, brackets were mounted to them fine. If there's one thing I can say is really solid about these rods, it's the mounting hardware. The rods snap into them securely, and even while we had to fuss with corner adapters, putting a bit more weight on them in the process than they're designed for, they all held up solidly, and even with repeatedly snapping the rods in and out of them during the process, they didn't malform or bend. TL;DR: These are cheap hardware. If you want something pretty, spend more money. If you want something that's 100% solid with no plastic, spend more money. But, if you're on a budget or if these are going up in a place where looks aren't super duper important, these will get the job done, and you (probably, barring any shipping issues) will be satisfied.
