Had it been packed better it'd been easier. The packing was adequate, but could have been done better. It was packed by Staples, I guess they have a pack and ship center in there, and possibly they'd never had to pack something like that before. It was two boxes, one that slid inside the other, filled with styrofoam peanuts, then taped together. The box took a pretty hard beating in shipping so that's where redoing the frame came in to play. I think it'd have been ok if they had used bands to hold them together. Since the ball tracks inside were pretty dirty, I disassembled everything and cleaned it all, then put it all back together. Nothing about all this was that difficult, just a bit time consuming. Overall, I think it was worth the effort.