New Entertainment Center

Short version is that I built a new entertainment center. Skip the rest of this post unless you want to read a long story about our old entertainment center.

Way back in the early 90's we bought an entertainment center. It did a great job of holding our 20" CRT TV and a Nintendo 64 console. It also had a shelf for a receiver and a super high tech CD changer. It was essentially a plywood box 5' wide, about 6' tall and maybe 18" deep with various cubbyholes and shelves. Nothing fancy, but it was what we could afford at the time. Somehow this thing survived 9 moves over the years. While we lived at place 6 of 9, we really went crazy and bought a 32" rear projection TV. This was not compatible with the old plywood box's TV area, so it was retired. It was still fairly nice and sturdy and I didn't really want to sell it on craigslist for a bit of nothing since it has some sentimental value at this point. I guess it was about 10-11 and I just liked it. It still had some writing that my older son scribbled on there when he was 4. He scrawled his initials on there and then when confronted about it told me that his Mom must've done it and that he didn't know anything about any writing on the side of the entertainment center. Anyway, at this point I moved the thing out to the shed where I used it as shelving to store stuff like propane tanks, small gas cans, 2 stroke oil for the weed wacker, bags of grass seed and that type of shed stuff. I had to take the casters off it in order to get it to fit under the loft in the shed, so that was the first casualty.

Fast forward a few years and we are now living at 7 of 9. The old entertainment center came with us and now was a shelf to hold things in the garage. It was rougher for the wear after a few years of shed duty and now on garage duty.  While we lived here we again went crazy and bought our first flat screen TV. Mrs. T.J. did not want to hang the new TV on the wall. Mr. T.J. figured we'd spent enough money on the new TV and didn't want to buy some new furniture.

The answer presented itself from a comment by my Father-In-Law who said something along the lines of, "Too bad you couldn't make that old entertainment center out in the garage work."

Challenge accepted. We took all the junk off it, cleaned it up a bit and did some measuring. We ended up removing the center vertical divider, the upper shelves and the backing for the upper shelves. This created a large gaping hold big enough to hold my new 55" TV. Below the TV shelf was three big cubbies. I needed a place to put the Tivo, the receiver, the PlayStation and the Wii. So after some head scratching and looking at the pieces of plywood we removed from the original configuration, I came up with a way to make a new shelf that would hold the electronics just below the TV.

We did some sanding, and then since there were so many stains on the poor thing, we just painted the whole thing white. Also had to buy and install some new caster wheels for the old girl.

It remained like this for the duration of 7 of 9, through 2 years at 8 of 9 and then 4.5 years at our present location.

So about 3 years ago there was some discussion of buying a new entertainment center. Me being me, told Mrs. T.J. that I could build one and that way we could get the exact thing we wanted instead of settling for something that would work, but not be exactly right. At this point I had built exactly two things that could in any way be considered furniture, but I figured how hard could it be.

I got some graph paper, did some measuring and came up with a rough plan. Not detailed enough to build anything, but just a sketch of what I wanted it to look like. Then with the never ending list of house projects I come up with, the new entertainment center kept getting bumped down the list as it was just not the most important thing at the time and our old one did what we needed, didn't look too bad and was like part of the family at this point.

Here is the old one after I took everything off of it and was preparing to get it down the stairs to the garage. As you can see it's essentially a plywood box. You can see a dado where the upper shelf used to be and one where the center divider used to be. The part that held the TV used to be the upper shelf, I just lowered it to create the electronics shelf.

I had to skip ahead a bit since that was the only picture I have handy of the old one. So, what happened to move the new entertainment center up the priority list was a new TV. Not to be normal, this was not a replacement for our old TV, but a second TV to be in our living room next to our old TV. Don't ask.

Mrs T.J. was ready to buy some particle board flat pack thing from Amazon or somewhere, when I intervened. Told her it would be silly to have two dissimilar entertainment centers next to each other. "I'll just buy two new ones that match then." This was getting serious. I went and dug up my sketches from a couple years ago and said I could just adjust what I had drawn up and make it bigger so two TVs will fit on it. One of the design 'features' of the sketch was an electric fire place in the bottom center with cabinets to either side, a low shelf to hold electronics and then the TV sitting on top. Pic of the sketch below, but I'm not clever enough to see how to resize or rotate pics I upload from my phone, so bear with me.

I was already planning on making something around 8' wide because I wanted to span a gap between two windows and thought that would look right in our room.

Now I had two 55" TVs to put on there and each was right about 4' wide, so I could just add a little and make the thing 9' wide. Then I made a new sketch and the fireplace was out of proportion with the two adjacent cabinets. After looking at a lot of fireplaces on Amazon, I settled on one that was about 50" wide. Sketch looked ok, and I started to develop a cut list to figure out how much and what type of wood to buy. I had a good plan and was ready to make a run to the big box store the next day, when Mrs. T.J. said, "It would be cool if the TVs could retract so we could lower them down when not watching." She was concerned about the strangeness of having two TVs next to each other. After a few minutes on the internet, I found that they make TV lifts just for this purpose. I had to make some major changes to the design because now I needed to be able to hold two 55" TVs inside the thing as well as still hold a receiver, a Tivo, a cable box, a PS4, speakers, and a fireplace. I ordered two TV lifts and the fireplace figuring I'd get those and then be able to get good measurements off of them to fine tune the design.

Are you sure you're not a carpenter?  You seem to have a knack for it. 

Lol, no not much of a carpenter, just not afraid to learn new things and learning by doing seems to be a good way to go about it for me.

So, the lifts and fireplace arrived. To ensure the project didn't get pushed back down the priority list, I emptied out the old entertainment center and wrangled it down the stairs to the garage. That was more 'fun' than I bargained for. I just eyeballed things and concluded that I could just take it down the stairs by myself and that I could do so with the thing upright. Turns out after I got it about 80% of the way down, the top of it hit the wall/ceiling and it was stuck. I struggled for a bit by removing the casters hoping to gain enough clearance, but that turned out to not be enough. Now I had a giant plywood box stuck in my stairwell. I had to use the outside stairs to the back deck to get up and down. Mrs T.J. offered a lot of 'help' at this point with lots of laughing at my expense, but not much else. I decided I needed to get it back upstairs and make a plan B. I knew it fit someway or the other since the movers got it up those stairs. It took me maybe an hour of pulling. lifting and cursing to get it back upstairs. That's when I measured it and found that if I turned it on its side it was about a foot lower and would fit down the stairs no problem. Doh.

Got the thing into I got the old one to the garage and took it apart thinking I would find a way to use some of the wood in the new unit. Here is just part of the remains.

In the meantime, I assembled the TV lifts, temporarilly mounted them to some scrap wood and placed the TVs on them to get some measurements. Yes that 5 miles of wire was previously hidden behind the old entertainment center. Most of it is speaker wire for the silly Bose speaker system. It came with nearly a mile of wire for the surround speakers and maybe a half mile each for the other three speakers. I've had these speakers for maybe 8 years and never wanted to cut the wires because they came with these cool little labels on the ends telling you which speaker and which wire was the red one. (Both wires are black, so without the labels it is hard to get red to red and black to black.)

Now I had TVs that I could raise and lower and a heck of an ugly mess to look at. So far this project was not an improvement over the original setup.

So, with my revised plan complete I went to Lowes and bought three sheets of 3/4" plywood, a bunch of 1x2 and 1x3 pine boards and then 3 10' 1x10 pine boards.

I built the thing about 10 times in my head trying to figure out the details of how it would go together and in what order I would assemble it. Then I started cutting. Since every project is really just an excuse to buy some new tools, I bought a dado stack for my table saw since I planned to use dados for the most part where the plywood pieces joined. Yay new tools.

After the stair debacle and getting all the lumber from Lowes to my garage by myself, I realized that there was no way I would ever get the new entertainment center up the stairs without small army of help. I did the only sensible thing and made the decision to build it right in the living room. I threw caution to the wind and cut all the plywood pieces including the various dados and rabbits based on my hand scrawled plans, then carried all the pieces upstairs to start assembling.

Here is a pic of the assembly in progress. It is pretty much two cabinet boxes with a connecting middle portion all sitting on a plywood base with 1x2s under it. I really liked how the old unit was on casters because it made it easy when I had to get behind there for some reason or another. I have 8 casters under it, but designed it for them to be pretty much hidden.I wanted it to look like it was just sitting on the floor.

A friend was visiting for the assembly stage and she was impressed that I essentially built my own Ikea furniture where all the pieces just go together.

Grab a cheap label maker and print your own labels. We did this the last time we redid our setup and it worked great, just leave enough extra label on the tail end so you can wrap it around and stick it to itself, with the word easily readable.

In reply to EastCoastMojo :

Great minds think alike. That is exactly what I did.  I had a goal of having all the wiring contained inside the box with only two power cords and the cable coax leaving the box. Getting rid of the extra lengths of speaker wire went a long way to make that work. I labeled to speaker cables and also put little labels on each plug at the surge suppressors so there is no guessing which power cord goes to which device.

One thing I wanted in the new design was for the TV to be a few inches lower than it was on the old one in an effort to get the center of the screen close to eye level when sitting. So besides the depth of the TV/list combo, I also needed to get a measurement of how low the top of the TVs were with the lifts all the way down since that would set the minimum height for the top surface.

What I found out was that with my fancy bottom and hidden casters, the new unit was going to have the TVs the same or maybe even an inch above where the old unit had it. That was not good. What I did was create little wells for the bases of the lifts to sit in that are 2 1/4" below the plywood base. That took a little thought to figure out how to make them as low as possible and attached to the base well enough to support the weight of the lift and TV. I don't have any pics of those.

looking good!

I had to go out of town for a week with the plywood carcass parked in the living room with nearly all the clamps I had on it. I put together a face frame of 1x3s and attached it.

The next design issue to tackle was how to finish this monster. Mrs. T.J. has some sort of super sensitive canine level bionic nose and smells that I cannot even detect can overwhelm her. I knew that whatever I ended up with for a finish, it was going to caused some friction.

We wanted to have sort of a rustic barnwood/beachy look to the thing. I spent some quality time on Youtube watching videos about aging wood. It seems that iron acetate may be a decent solution. I mixed up a mason jar of the stuff (just vinegar and a steel wool pad, then wait a few days for the steel to dissolve.) and after a few days tried it out on some scrap wood. Unfortunately, it works by chemical reacting with the tannins in the wood, and my pine boards didn't much tannins, so the effect was subtle at best. I also ran a test where I treated a piece of wood with tea then applied the iron acetate. That made an interesting look and the solution really didn't smell too bad at all since the acetic acid of the vinegar gets used up in the reaction, it really didn't smell as strong as plain vinegar.

While looking at various YouTube videos about finishing wood like it was job, I came across one made by an English woman who showed her technique to creating a weathered look I wanted by using two different colors of stain plus some white or off white latex paint. Just for fun I also tried that on a piece of scrap.

As luck would have it, Mrs T.J. liked the stain one the best and gave the nod to go that route despite the smell.

I made a larger test piece to experiment a bit with the technique.

Looks like what we wanted and it is easy to do. Looks pretty convincing as old weathered wood, but is just a brand new pine board. I used Minwax gray stain that I had leftover from my Overnight Sensation speaker build (mentioned here)and some Minwax Espresso stain leftover from my floating shelf meant to look like a railroad tie that I covered here. (Both of those threads now has no pics of mine since they were all on Photobucket.)

That finish looks great!

So, I put down some cardboard to protect the floor and started staining. Here is a pic of the one of the ends.

I did this end first as it will be the least visible side once it is in place.

Here is another shot an hour or so later.

I ended up doing the stain then two coats of polycrillic over it.

At this point I still hadn't built the cabinet doors or decided if I was going to build any shelves inside the cabinets. Since I was doing all this work in the middle of the living area of our house I got more input than I would normally get when I build something down in the garage. The instructions were to make the cabinet doors go all the way up to the top and cover the upper shelf. This was a change in plans and at first I wasn't sold on the idea. I realized that I should be able to fit the three devices with IR remotes all on the center shelf so there was no really need to have the side shelves open to the front.

The PS4 could live behind a door just fine.

You can see some of the holes I cut for the cables. Those squarish openings were made so that when the TV was raised I would be able to reach in from the back and plug/unplug cables into the various boxes. I was worried that the wall would be visible when the TV was up and the TV screen may be visible when the TV was down. I didn't like that idea, so I thought about ways to fix that.

Meanwhile, I cut the pieces for the top figuring I would assemble and stain that down in the garage.

The top is essentially three 1x10 boards, but the back board is cut into two pieces and attached with piano hinges so the TVs can come out. I decided to create breadboard ends because I thought it would look better and because I wanted to have the top securely fastened to the carcass that the corners.

This is the front left corner. The breadboard end will go to the rear corner. The missing piece is one of the TV door flaps. Figured I'd use this picture of the top in progress just because it has a car in the background and this is GRM.

Here is a pic taken with the fireplace in place and the top in place. Nether was attached at this point, just more of a mock up to see how it was going to look.

The TV flapper doors are just sitting in place as well. No hinges yet. You can see how the left rear is not quite flush at this point.

The fireplace is 50" wide but only like 6" deep, so the space behind it was planned to be used as a place for the subwoofer. That worked out great.

Next, I had to tackler the doors. I had in mind some sort of contrasting color for the cabinet doors. Was going to make them inset, but now that the boss said they had to go all the way up to the top, they needed to be overlay doors. I originally wanted to have two doors on each cabinet, but a slight miscalculation with the width of the fire place made that a challenge. There just wasn't much space between the glass fire place front and where the inner set of doors would mount. I decided that instead of four smaller doors I would go with two large doors. I was worried that the doors were going to be so big that they would look a little wonky and out of proportion. After some thought and some sketches, I came up with the idea of just emphasizing your assets. If I am going to have giant doors that look like they could be on a barn, why not make them look like actual barn doors?

I made basic frames out of 1x2 pine boards. I was going to use some pallet wood to make the door panels, but was worried that since the doors were twice as wide and about 8" taller than the original plan that the weight of the doors may stress the hinges too much. I wanted rustic looking, but I didn't want sagging doors.

I had some leftover luan from another project. I cut it into strips and routed rabbits in the inner part of each of the door frame pieces. I painted the luan with a mix of some gray and some white latex paints I had sitting around in my collection of old paint cans. I sanded them a bit here and there to get the weathered look I was after, then assembled to frames with the panels inside. Mostly for aesthetics I put the diagonal pieces. I added some stiffeners across the backside of the panels to stop the 1/4" plywood from being quite so floppy.

After three trips to Lowes I finally ended up with some hinges that would work. It only took two trips to get the right door pulls.

Here is it with the doors installed and stuff all in place.

At this point I realized that the Tivo, receiver, cable box and three speakers could fit in the center shelf, they were really cramped. I didn't like it. The speakers had to sit on top of the electronics and were partially behind the front face. I ended up buying an IR receiver/transmitter things and I moved the cable box over to the right cabinet. The little IR receiver I just stuck on my receiver so the remote works with the box behind the closed door. The PS4 is also behind the right door.

I have a video of the fire place and TVs going up and down. If I get adventurous I'll upload it to the youtubes and link it here. In short, the thing works great. When the TVs are down, the top looks like a regular top. Press a button on a remote and the flap opens and a TV appears.

It took some shimming to get that to all work smoothly and to look nice with the TVs down. I created small ramps out of an old cutting board, so the top of the TV lifts don't push against the underside of the top to open them. Instead they push on these pieces of hard plastic. I had to make them into ramps because there is a strange part of the lifts where the top part protrudes to the rear past the rest of the lifting column. The TVs would go up just fine, but on the way down the little lip would catch the edge of the board and try to destroy it.

I am not 100% certain if this thing will fit down the stairs and out the front door or not. The front door is offset from the stairs by a bit and there is not a lot of space between the stairs and the door. This thing may have to convey with he house if we ever sell.