DIY living room credenza
A custom entertainment unit was something we’d been talking about for years and never got around to building, but suddenly it was bumped up to the top of our project list. We had a new curved TV that needed to be hung lower than our last one, which meant our electric fireplace no longer fit neatly before it. It got the boot, and then we had nowhere to store all of the crap that goes under a TV — digital box, video game consoles and a zillion snaking cords that need to be hidden. We stuck a small cabinet there temporarily. It looked awful. And so, I started sketching to see what we needed in our new custom piece. While it would look like a TV stand, our TV was wall-mounted so it wasn’t going to be standing on anything — just floating right above it, making it technically a credenza. We needed shelves for electronic components, and also cabinets to hide baskets of Wii accessories and folded-up quilts. Then we got out a measuring tape and started getting specific. We wanted it to span the entire wall, which meant it needed to be about 90 inches long. Height-wise, we had about 36 inches of space to fill vertically before it would skim the bottom of the wall-mounted TV. Those were the measurements we couldn’t change, but the rest of the measurements fell into place easily. Since one of the shelves needed to fit our soundbar (41 and a half inches long) the decision was made that the shelving section should be 42 inches wide. We’d make the top two shelves each about four inches apart (snuggly fitting the soundbar, digital box, PS4, etc.) and the bottom two shelves would be exactly tall enough to fit game cases and the taller gaming systems. Once we knew the shelving section would be 42 inches wide, that left about 24 inches on each side for cabinets. Figuring out the unit’s depth was also easy, since we knew we wanted to use the same 16 inch wide, eight foot long planked boards we’d used last year on our kitchen recycling centre. Whew! I was glad when the math portion was over. It started off looking like not much of anything — a bunch of two-by-fours kreiged together to make what looked like two ladders with missing rungs. But once they were connected by some vertical two-by-fours, it immediately took shape and started looking like the skeleton of the credenza we’d sketched: a shelving unit in the middle, with a cabinet on either side. Once we had the frame built, we could cut the shelves down to size so I could get started on sanding, staining and polying them (I knew it would be impossible to do that well once everything was assembled, since some of them would only be a few inches apart). I did single coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine and followed up with a triplethick polyurethane. All together, we had four shelf boards plus two side boards that would make up the side of the shelving portion. They were huge and I had to work on them in shifts so each side could dry properly. Our daughter and I also sanded, stained and polyed the parts of the skeleton that would be visible even after we added the shelves and sides, as well as the insides of each cabinet. Speaking of cabinets, my Handy Husband used a couple of one-by-fours to frame out where each cabinet door needed to be hung, and I painted those white (Fusion Mineral Paint’s Picket Fence). We originally thought about using two leftover kitchen cabinet doors but they weren’t quite the right size, so we made our own. We framed out custom doors using more one-byfours and mitred down a bunch of one-by-twos to create a fun diagonal design inset in each door. It took forever painting the edges of each individual one-by-two piece, lining them up, nailing them to the door frames and then painting them again, but I’m glad we put in the extra work to make them so special. We used the unit like this for about a week until Handy Husband had more days off, and then we jumped back in. It was starting to come together, but it still needed a top, a base and backing. We’d “saved” lots of height for the final steps of adding a base and a top, and we needed both to be pretty thick since we wanted the unit to come as close to the bottom of the TV as possible. We flipped the unit over and decided that standing some two-by-fours on their sides would give it the right amount of height. We set them in about two inches from the outside edge and covered them with more one-by-fours to make a kickplate of sorts (so dog toys wouldn’t get stuck underneath the unit). Our son painted the kickplate white to match the cabinets, but he wasn’t as enthusiastic about helping as our daughter had been with the staining. Then it was time to finish the top. Instead of a wimpy, skinny top lying across the top of the unit, we trimmed the 16-inch-wide, eight-foot-long planked board down to size, lifted it up off the unit with hidden pieces of two-by-four (for height) and then chunked it up by adding extra one-bythrees around the edges. It turned the long skinny board into what looked like a thick, heavy slab. I gave the whole thing a good sanding to make it feel like one uniform piece, then stained and polyed it to match the shelving section. After we hung the cabinet doors and added the beautiful carved cast-iron pulls (possibly my favourite part of the whole unit), the very last step was adding the back pieces to hide all of those ugly cords. I’d already stained three separate pieces of plywood, and all we had to do was cut them to size and tap them in place with a few nails. Then my Handy Husband used his hole saw to cut places for the electronics’ cords to run through to the back of the unit. The best part, of course, was filling up the finished unit. The shelving section fit our gadgets and games perfectly but was even larger than we’d imagined, so I need to play around with styling it so it looks a bit more filled up. The soundbar fits perfectly into its custom shelf, which is so satisfying. The cabinets are also even larger than we expected, so they’re each barely half-full. (We might add a shelf in each cabinet, too, but we were just too tired by the end of this build!) This was one of the biggest custom furniture projects we’ve ever made together, and even though we (temporarily) wrecked the main level of our house with sawdust and piles of tools, it all feels worth it looking at the finished piece. Our new TV no longer feels mammoth in our not-that-big living room because it’s above a unit with the same (mammoth) proportions. It holds everything we need and more — and it looks much nicer than when we had everything shoved on the fireplace mantel below our old TV. Best of all, we all feel proud that we made this together as a family — and that’s something you can’t get from a furniture store. Heather Laura Clarke is a crafty maker and lives in Truro with her husband, son, and daughter. Follow her adventures at HeathersHandmadeLife.com. Twitter: (@HFXHeather) Email: heatherlauraclarke@gmail.com