Not difficult to assemble definitely would be better if you had two people to help you take the bout 30 minutes to assemble it’s very beautiful I would recommend getting the zinus brackets by amazon to support a bed frame like the one pictured purchased separately of course. If you have regular bed rails I would say you need to make sure that it will attach to your regular bed rails I do not have a boxspring on my bed the size of my bed is a queen this is a queen pillow top mattress I already had for about a year. With the boxspring it would’ve been very high but you can’t adjust the headboard to be really really high if you want to put a boxspring on your bed if you like a very high bed you can adjust how much space you want to show between the headboard and the mattress and the wall I wanted minimum space to be shown but I also wanted the full headboard to show