Bar carts for apartments

Every roundup for apartments is really a roundup for small rooms, and small rooms are covered in the small-cart page. What is actually different about an apartment is three constraints that never appear on a listing.

Constraint one: the doorway

A standard interior door is around 30 to 32 inches wide, and an apartment entrance can be narrower. Every cart in our library except the VASAGLE ULRC083A02 at 33.9 inches will pass through a 32 inch door assembled, and most are flat-packed anyway. The one to watch is not the cart's width but its width plus the wheels, which listings usually include and occasionally do not.

The pick here is the MAHANCRIS RCJ63B01Z at 24.8 by 11 inches and 14.74 lb: it goes through anything, and one person can carry it up a stairwell.

Constraint two: the floor

Apartments are disproportionately hard floors, and hard casters on hard floors are the wrong combination — they roll too easily, they are loud, and on some laminates they mark. This is a genuine reason to prefer a heavier cart in an apartment than you would elsewhere: 20-plus lb stays where it is put.

If your floor is a thin carpet over concrete, the opposite applies — small hard casters sink in and the cart stops rolling entirely, which makes the wheels decoration. The full detail is in the caster guide.

Constraint three: you will move it out again

Rented furniture assumptions are different from owned ones. A cart in an apartment is likely to be disassembled, boxed and reassembled at least once, and the components that survive that badly are engineered-wood shelves — the cam fixings loosen and the cut edges chip. Glass shelves survive moving well if they are packed; particleboard survives it once.

This is the strongest argument for buying the cheap cart rather than the good one for a first apartment. The specific version of that argument is in the starter roundup.

Where a cart goes in an apartment

Almost always one of three places: the gap beside the sofa, the wall opposite the kitchen, or the dead corner by the window. All three want a different shape.

• Beside the sofa: height matters. A cart at 32 inches works as an end table beside a standard sofa arm; one at 36.5 towers over it.
• Opposite the kitchen: depth matters, because this is usually a walkway. Under 13 inches deep keeps the route clear.
• The corner: the round cart wins here, because a circle has no corner to waste against a corner.

The clearance arithmetic is in where to put a bar cart.

If nothing fits

It happens, and the alternatives are real rather than consolation prizes. A tray on an existing surface solves the actual problem — bottles and glasses in one place — for a fraction of the cost. Two floating shelves take zero floor space. Both are covered in what to use instead of a bar cart.