Great cat tree, especially for the price. As others have noted, the base is small which makes it inherently pretty unstable, and you'll most likely need to brace it somehow. I positioned this next to a short, fairly solid piece of furniture, and used a cargo strap to loop around the furniture and secure it to one of the posts on the cat tree. That's been plenty adequate. You could also use a heavy sandbag across the base, or attach a furniture bracket (like the ones you'd use to prevent bookshelves from tipping over) to the underside of the middle shelf and attach it to the wall. You can find a method that works for you, just be aware without bracing of any kind your cat might find it too wobbly and unstable to use.My cat took awhile to start using this tree, but now she loves it. I've had a hard time getting my cat to scratch appropriate stuff (she's had like six different sorts of scratching posts but always goes for the couch instead), but she LOVES the posts on this and uses them often. She really likes to sit on the top shelf and get a high up view out our patio doors. She is a fairly small cat though, only about 8.5 pounds; if she was really big, I'm not sure she'd find the shelf size on this tree very roomy.My box was missing a piece, the very top platform wasn't there, but I didn't notice until I'd assembled everything else and I did NOT want to take it apart, rebox it, and ship it back to Amazon for replacement. Instead I contacted the company that makes it, Trixie Pets, and asked if they could ship just that individual part to me. They were super responsive and had it on the way to me the next business day.Overall I'm really happy with it, it's been holding up well and it's on about the same level of quality as cat trees I see in my local pet shops for 2-3x the price. I wish the base was bigger, as that's a pretty significant design flaw, but coming up with a way to solve that problem was easier than coming up with a lot more money to buy a different cat tree. :D