Having bounced between four apartments during school, most of my furniture was of the shabby variety. It was cheap to begin with, it barely survived the multiple moves, and it was a motley collection of styles. When my wife and I moved into our current place, we got rid of all our college furniture and promised to avoid replacing it with more particle-board furniture. If we were going to buy furniture, we wanted it to last.
We started slowly, buying things that fit our small apartment and our style. On some items, though, our desired style was priced beyond what two recent college grads (both with English degrees, no less) could afford. Arbitrarily constrained by our own rules and our expensive taste, we went months without any furniture in our living room. It was a sad state of affairs.
I had recently picked back up a hobby I first developed when I was younger, and I found that I both enjoyed and excelled at wood-working. After the success of my Mississippi River shelf, I decided to tackle other furniture needs of ours. I started with a console/sofa table before moving on to more complicated projects. My tool collection was, to put it lightly, limited, and jig saws were never meant to cut straight lines. Despite that limitation, my table came out surprisingly well. It initially had a slight warp to the skirt, but adding the tabletop fixed it. The whole thing is screwed together from inside the skirt, so no hardware shows on the outside, which I'm quite proud of.
I then moved on to a more complicated project: the TV stand. I once again wanted to avoid exposed hardware, so I went with a box-joint construction. I measured out and cut matching, interlocking teeth into the four boards that form the outer structure with, once again, just a jig saw. I borrowed a circular saw and cut out on both the top and bottom pieces of wood a track for a sliding door. During assembly, the four sides had a tendency to form a parallelogram, so I had to hold it at right angles until the glue set, all the while acting the part of a juicebox for the mosquitoes.
The finished product took a sun-bleached stain for the majority of it, and the same blue as the console table for the sliding door and the shelves behind it. The stand sits on a recessed foot two inches tall, so it has the effect of floating just above the floor. The benefit of building your own TV stand is that you can size it to fit your TV perfectly. The only aspect I wish I considered a little more was cable management; although, for the most part, the cables hide well enough behind the left half.
I've kind of been hankering to redo this project now that I have better tools. With my table saw, I should be able to cut the box joints at lower variance, so the gaps will be much tighter. I also didn't notice at first that the glue I used to hold everything together was of the non-stainable variety, and I used too much. I had to sand quite a bit to remove the exposed, dried wood glue, but I wasn't able (or patient enough) to remove all of it. Before I redo a perfectly function TV stand, though, I have some cheapo, plastic Adirondack porch chairs I need to replace/upgrade.
0 comments :
Post a Comment