I am nervous and excited to share this new project! This is our first big building project!
Our family room is pretty large {17′ x 17′} and I have been having a hard time finding a media console that is large enough to fit the wall, but affordable enough for our budget. The husband and I have searched high and low and found nothing {other than IKEA furniture} that would work for our room. One night about a week ago I decided to see what it would take for us to make our own built-in type of storage across the whole wall. After making up some sketches and visiting the hardware store, the husband and I roughly estimated that the wood to build a piece of furniture would cost under $200!
Most of the media pieces we had found at furniture stores & outlets were easily $2,000 for the size we needed, so we decided to move forward with our built-in plans. I’m hoping this piece will turn out as good as I’m picturing! It’s going to be a long process; this post is just Part 1 – cutting the wood! :-)
The plan is to build 3 individual sections in the garage, move each into the family room, and then connect them together. Each piece will be 68″ long. Two of the sections will be 60″ tall and the center will be a 15″ bench with storage. The bench will have a cushion on top of it so the finished height should be approximately 18.” I have made sure that each storage section has enough space to hold every piece of electronic equipment that we need to store. Let me tell you that’s a lot of stuff: long speaker/iPod dock, cable box, BluRay player, Roku & Apple TV, record player, records, game consoles, etc.
*Please keep in mind that we aren’t anywhere near experts…this is a sort of experiment for us!
We have both a hand saw and a table saw, but the large sheets of plywood wouldn’t easily go through the table saw with a straight cut. The husband had a brilliant idea to use a left-over 2×4 to help cut a straight line with the hand saw. I call it the “unscientific method.” My concern was that the 2×4 wasn’t completely straight itself, so our cuts wouldn’t be perfect.
We ended up with “unscientific method 2″…Our long level was the same size as the plywood, so we clamped that to the wood, took into account the size of the saw, and cut. This method seemed to work well for us and we ended up with a great system that saved us a lot of time. After we made the large cuts with the hand saw, we used the table saw for all the small stuff.
The husband was so wonderful to help me out on this project…especially considering the sweltering Indiana heat!
I can tell you there were definitely no clouds out…
As we cut the wood, I used a pencil to label each piece so we didn’t have to go around measuring them while we were trying to build.
We decided last-minute to built a base so we could add baseboard molding to the bottom without interfering with the storage space. Thank goodness we had some 2×4’s laying around from an old project. We cut the 2×4’s so they were approximately 1/2″ smaller than the built-in on the front and back, and stapled them together at the joints.
Then we took our bottom piece of plywood and nailed it to the base for stability.
That’s it for this installment of Family Room Built-Ins! I hope you’ll come back soon to see what happens next…there’s a LOT more for us to build.
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It’s a good post.
Thank you :-)