Category Archives: ✔ TV Cabinet

TV Cabinet
I say: Should take a couple of weeks
Wife says: Better be done by Christmas

TV has a home

Wife informs me that this project took 3 years and 10 months to complete.  I told her that the last Olympics didn’t seem like it was that long ago, and the TV cabinet was quicker.  She wasn’t impressed.

Here it is. The TV has a new home.  When the cabinet was started, the little man modelling it wasn’t even in the picture!  It features drawers (upper left and right) to hold CDs and DVDs.  Beneath those the doors fold out and down on cabinet style hinges – these to hold the Wii etc.  Tinted glass doors open to reveal an adjustable height shelf.

Many drama’s unfolded and were solved (or cludged) during this build, including:

  • The drawer faces on the left are pine, whereas the rest is Macrocarpa.  They needed to be stained darker to match.
  • One of the internal walls had cut-outs made on the wrong edge before I realised it was turned 90 degrees. The botch-up is at the back 🙂
  • The glass doors were too wide and overlapped in the middle. A local glass company cut them down 2mm each.
  • I cursed and swore at my ‘cheap, useless’ tools for not cutting straight edges when in fact the cabinet was almost 10mm off-square!  Fixing the top in-place rectified that.

But I get to tick another off the list!  What to start next….

Son modelling the new TV cabinet

The plan

Every project needs a plan, even if it’s just a sketch on a napkin.

Here is my design for the TV cabinet I’m making. It has been drawn up using Adobe Flash, to scale, so that if I need a measurement I can just click on a line and it tells me exactly how long it is. handy!

The middle section contains two shelves for the DVD player and Freeview unit, fronted by tinted glass doors.  On either side of the doors are what appear to be two drawers.  The lower drawer in fact flips forward to reveal a shelf for a game console, making it easy to keep controllers and other cords tidy.  The upper drawer is just a drawer to hold DVDs and games.

TV Cabinet plans

Forking out the hard-earned’s

Most of the time having so many projects isn’t a problem.  All they take up is time.  But there comes a point in most project’s lives where you have to fork out some hard-earned beans.  That is usually the point for me where a project goes from being fun to being… something else.

The trouble is that once money has been spent on a project there is an obligation to see it through.  It goes from a ‘waste of time’ to a ‘waste of money’.  And most people (including myself) don’t have enough money to take that sort of thing lightly.  And many people (like myself) have wives that don’t take that sort of thing lightly, either.

Lucky for me then, spending money on my TV cabinet project has one big bonus – there is a lot of visible progress, which is a great incentive to keep the pace up!

Even though I am sorely tempted, it is probably better to pay $100 to get this timber dressed than to spend $1,000 on a thicknesser and do it myself, right?  So really, I am saving money…

The TV cabinet is being built out of Macrocarpa to match the coffee table.  All the timber is measured and tallied ready to bring to the joiner later this week where it will be beautifully dressed.

Timber stacked and ready to go

Measure twice. But measure the right thing…

There was a time when TVs were like small fridges with blurry, curved screens, and 1080 was just a pesticide.  One day we will tell our children and grand children, and they will laugh, and then we will realise how absolutely ridiculous those old things were.

That time (for me) was only last year.  But the local Dick Smith (not a variation of ‘Lock Smith’ or ‘Gold Smith’, but an electronics chain store in New Zealand) was having a sale.

I had my eye on a shiny, slim 37″ Sony Bravia model, and since it was clearance stock the salesman said we would save a whole bunch of money by buying it.  My wife cautiously agreed – on one condition; that it fit into our current TV cabinet.  So I looked up the model on the internet, measured twice, checked thrice, and it would fit easy!  So you can imagine my surprise when we had the TV home and it wouldn’t fit in the hole.  They must have given us the bigger model!

Sadly, no.  Seems I took the measurements without the stand.  Oops.  Now we have nowhere to put the TV and it seems I have another project to add to the list…

1950s TV