The TV Cabinet, Part 1

Well people, I promised you that shortly I would start posting about what I'm doing, so now I'm doing it. As I said in my first post, the thing that is top of my to-do list is to build a TV cabinet to replace the highly classy one that we currently have sitting in our living room:

As you can see it's a highly classy affair. Not only is it made out of FANTASTIC iron shelving suitable for a hardware store, the shelving has been painting a lovely shade of AWESOME BLACK, and actually consists of two separate low tables, which clearly doubles the AWESOME-ness.

Next to it sits my wonderful radio, which I can actually describe as being awesome without being sarcastic or breaking my face.

Anyways, of the marbou wood that I built the coffee table with (yes, I'll put some coffee table pics up later), and the side table, I still had enough left I felt to put into the TV cabinet to give the whole room a nice consistency. Not enough for the whole thing though, so the design I came up with is as follows:

The design is straight forward, there's two staple-like shapes at either end, made out of my yummy marbou wood. In between is going to be some drawers made out of pine planks, which will be attached to a piece of ply wood that sits inside each staple. Sounds pretty straight-forward right?

The table top is going to be glass. At first we though clear, but at dad's suggestion, we think now that instead we'll go with an opaque glass, probably frosted, so that people can't see the garbage in the drawers.

Ok, STEP 1: Make staple thingies with piece of ply in the middle:

Well that was easy. The ply is held in by some nifty brackets I found at Bunnings: you can simple cut them into the size that you want.

Well, actually what you do is not so much cut them as attempt to cut them with not-very-suitable diamond pliers, then take your hammer and hit it repeatedly so you bend the bracket at the point you tried to cut it backwards and forwards about 3 or 4 times. This eventually means that the pathetic scratches you made with the pliers turn into breaks and you can then beat the bracket back to flat again with afore-mentioned hammer. If you haven't noticed, I am quite the fan of the flat-headed-kinetic-encourager.

The plywood has the nice side-effect of keeping these things nice and rigid and making sure everything is square.

STEP 2: join staples:

One piece of MDF does the trick, along with a few braces to give the thing a bit of rigidity. I know this isn't going to do the best job in the world, and it won't be the most rigid thing ever, but it does seem to do the trick ok. I may consider bolstering it with another piece of wood up the top later.

Ok, now it's drawer time! YAY!

Here's a couple of the bottom drawer being put

in.

The most important criteria for me for this bottom drawer is that it can fit a DVD case on it's side. As demonstrated by the Wii Play case, it does, YAY!

And that's it, that's where I'm up to. Next job is to put the second drawer in, but unfortunately it's been raining today so I couldn't get anything done today (Sally does not appreciate sawdust inside.) After that get the bits to support the glass, do all the little bits like puttying and staining and fitting handles to the drawers, and it'll be a lean mean TV-bearing machine.