What I’ve been doing instead of blogging…

Building furniture 😀

I turned these:

Into this:

When we bought this house, it had thick, blue carpet everywhere. The previous owners had cats, and all of us are allergic to some degree so we had to pull it all. We replaced the carpet on the main floor with Pergo XP flooring (because toddler and TACTICAL DOG). A coworker’s husband installed the flooring and also put in some beautiful stairs:

The old stairs were, according to him, “paint grade” and unsuitable for staining so he pulled them out. I saved them for a later project which ended up being this entertainment center.

The new house has a living room on the main floor and a theater room upstairs, whereas the old house just had one huge room on the main floor. We put all the entertainment center stuff from the old house in the theater room and decided after a couple of months of searching that I was just going to have to build one. The problem we were running into was that we couldn’t find one that fit in the space available and could hold the Home Theater PC I built last year*.

Each of the sides and shelves are made from three of the toekicks from the stairs. I had to shave about 3/4″ from each side to get rid of glue and to make them straight. I then joined them with dowels.

Let’s see so there were 6 panels made of 3 toekicks which each required 3 cuts. That’s 54 separate cuts. Then the dowel joining was three dowels per. So that’s 6 dowels per panel. That’s 12 holes that had to be drilled. Again, 6 panels so that’s 48 precision holes.

That was a pain in the ass. Bad choice for a first project.

The top was just two of the stair treads cut to length and merely glued together. Easy.

I assembled the thing with glue and the nailgun I just bought because I was fed up with dowels by that point.

Oh, and I did about a million coats of paint and primer, plus sanding.

It was a big project. I’m glad I did it because I learned a lot. I’ve already started on my second project and after working on it for about 3 hours it already looks like this:

I cheated this time by having Lowe’s make all the cuts for me and using a Kreg K4 Jig to join them. It needs more work but it’s going a lot faster and this time I’m going to go with stain instead of paint.

*The HTPC can’t go in the theater room because the room was finished about 10 years after the house was built and isn’t tied into the HVAC system. It uses a PTHP that is either On or Off, so it effectively has no climate controls.