Solving a problem

For quite some time, I've had a problem. You may have the same problem. It looks like this:

I've had a tall and wide entertainment cabinet for quite some time. It has three drawers for CDs and videos, a space in the middle for the TV, and the room at the top for components. It's on wheels, but given how big it is and how much it weighs, it's pretty much impossible to move on carpet. At our first house, it fit with another cabinet into a closet that I modified to fit perfectly, but in our current house, it hulked on one side of the room, taking up space and looking menacing.

One of the reasons I wanted to buy our current house is that it had a closet in the corner of our rec room that had access from behind, and I could build an in-wall cabinet for the stereo components. But we needed to do it as part of a full remodel of the room. The first step was to have somebody else move the door to the outside to a more convenient wall. I tore out the old closet, built the new one, and built the hatch from behind.

Then we did the floor, an Alloc one ordered from FloorShop.com. It's a wood-look laminate that is very durable, and proof against dog-claws. It took about 9 hours to do the whole room.

Unfortunately, like most of our projects, I didn't take any good "before" pictures, but here's one during the floor installation:

After the floor went down, we got ready for the next part. It was somewhat complicated by the fact that the outer walls were built on top of a 6" wide concrete base, which led to a 1 1/2" curb running around the outside. I handled that by furring out the lower section of the wall, putting 1/4" MDF over the furring, and then wainscotting and a 1x4 shelf to cap it off. To balance off the rest of the room, we did normal wainscotting around the inner walls of the room. All of the wainscotting and trim is made from vertical grain fir. The wainscotting rails and stiles all have a 1/4" bead routed into them (that took a ton of time).

The stereo cabinet carcass fit into a framework of 2x4s that I built into the closet. It was made out of maple plywood, with a cherry-ish stained interior and black shelves, to match the entertainment center than we bought. The frame and door are built out of alder, designed and stained to match the entertainment center. The faux finish on the upper half of the room was done by my wife and daughter.

The electrical box will have a picture on top of it to hide it.

Here's the final view of the front of the room. Click here for a high-resolution version.

Total cost estimate:

Flooring                  $1500
Wood for trim         $  800
Cabinet wood         $  250
Paint                       $   50

Total (ish)               $2600

I won't include the router bits and other tools I bought, but they total somewhere around another $200. At least, that's what I like to tell myselves.

Up next -

Tile for one of the bathrooms.

New walls and insulation, then tile for the utility room.

New walls, insulation, and flooring in the office.

Three decks (two replacement, one new one).